TDCCairo, Egypt is the capital of the Arab world and the largest desert city on the planet. For centuries it has thrived alongside the Nile, the world’s longest river. Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Video by Bryce Plank With editing help from Robin West
Cairo, Egypts MEGACITY: Largest City in the Middle EastTDC2017-09-14 | Cairo, Egypt is the capital of the Arab world and the largest desert city on the planet. For centuries it has thrived alongside the Nile, the world’s longest river. Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Video by Bryce Plank With editing help from Robin West
Music: Bonad "Down By The River" Hans Johnson "Human Connection (Instrumental)" Hans Johnson "One Planet (Instrumental)" idokay "Life's Journey Begins"
0:00 Welcome to Bangkok 0:34 The Geography of Bangkok 1:35 Thai Power: America, King Bhumibol, & the Military 2:39 Modern, Hardworking Thailand 3:27 Travel to 'The World's Best City' 4:16 Buddhist Culture 4:51 An Open Society 5:00 Rapid Warming 5:40 Crowded Roads and Rails 6:37 Midwife Traffic Cops 6:59 Greening of Bangkok 8:05 Bangkok's Green Lung 8:32 Looking Ahead 9:41 A video by Bryce Plank
Bangkok, Thailand’s vibrant, sprawling capital consistently ranks as the most visited destination on earth. There’s a dark underbelly here for sure, but that’s one of many ingredients that makes this ‘Venice of the East’ a perfect encapsulation of megacities in the 21st century, with their dynamism and tragedy. It’s modern, tropical, polluted, crowded, delicious.
Bangkok now straddles the Chao Phraya a few kilometers upriver from a bay that flows into a gulf and, eventually, the sea. In 1782 it became the capital of Siam–the name Thailand wasn’t invented until 1939. Its previous capital, Ayutthaya Burmese Army.
Today, Bangkok’s historic heart is Rattanakosin Island with its Grand Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the most sacred site in Thailand. Ratchadamnoen Avenue features the Democracy Monument and is lined by major government buildings. Canals
World War 2, the United States Thai society corruption King Bhumibol
Bangkok greenspace new park is Chulalongkorn Centenary water-retention pond, underground drainage system, and rain garden. Another is the newly expanded Benjakitti Park elevated pedestrian walkway to Lumpini, the city’s first public park. They will all help combat Bangkok’s serious flooding problem.
0:00 The beautiful city 0:44 The old city 1:03 Napoleon III takes control 1:38 Appoints Haussmann prefect 2:01 The transformation begins 2:45 Haussmann opens Paris up 3:28 Uniform building design 4:08 Arc De Triomphe 4:43 A global city 5:24 2024 Olympic Games
The most populated metro area in the EU has a surprising lack of tall buildings. This is by design. Paris limits the height of new buildings to 37 meters, and has clustered 20 of its 24 skyscrapers in the La Defense business district at the west end of its historical axis, 10 km away from the Louvre at its eastern end.
This straight vista exemplifies Paris’ geometric street plan and unified aesthetic. It wasn’t always this neat. To create what many regard as the world’s most beautiful city required a massively ambitious, disruptive reconstruction lasting decades, overseen by an urban visionary.
In the 1830s, a cholera pandemic devastated cities worldwide.
French President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, was uniquely positioned to act. He too was frustrated by these conditions and dreamed of making Paris a modern, hygienic, global city. But, although he was extremely popular, he was constitutionally-barred from running for reelection. So at the end of his term in 1851 he seized total control of the government and declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of France. With absolute power, he fast-tracked his plans for Paris, appointing seasoned administrator Georges-Eugene Haussmann as the project’s leader.
They created 4,900 acres of parks, 24 new squares, and planted 600,000 trees. Never before had a city built so many parks so quickly. They constructed a 150 km long aqueduct to bring fresh spring water into the city and expanded the sewer system so it could carry away solid waste for the first time by adding 380 km of tunnels, which they also ran gas lines through to fuel new street lamps all over, turning Paris into the ‘City of Light.’
He meticulously mapped out 63 km of new wide, straight boulevards. This would require the demolition of 20,000 buildings and the relocation of 300,000 Parisians.
To replace what they tore down, 34,000 new buildings were erected in a uniform style: commercial space on the bottom, balconies on the middle floors, and at the top, dormer windows under roofs sloped at 45 degrees to maximize the amount of sunlight on the street. The facades were Roman-style limestone, while the roofs used zinc, giving Paris its distinctively harmonious blonde/gray look.
Haussmann used monuments as landmarks for roads and intersections. A general rule of thumb: the larger the statue, the longer the road. Few monuments on Earth are larger than the Arc de Triomphe, a war memorial. Haussmann’s most controversial move was remaking the Île de la Cité.
Napoleon and Haussmann aimed to complete the first phase of their citywide project in time to host the 1855 World’s Fair and its 5 million visitors. They succeeded, and over the next 15 years the duo continued improving the city for the benefit of all Parisians, and the tourists who arrived in ever greater numbers. In 1840 there were 87,000 passages across the English Channel. By 1899 there were 951,000. Today, Paris trails only Bangkok and London in welcoming more foreigners.
This week, Paris hosted the first Olympic ceremonies ever held outside of a stadium along a 6 km stretch of the Seine river. Grand Paris Express metro megaproject.
world news president biden tdc megacity delhi history obama mumbai india cnbc wendover productions vox cgtn the b1m dw documentary reallifelore tom scott geodiode dw planet a CBS News CNA Insider BBC Earth Lab National Geographic reuters economics explained endevr real stories the economist kamala harris anne hidalgo olympics 2024 olympics highlights biles lebron james paris france macron chicago dublin seine eu london usa haussmann napoleon III Dublin Chicago 2024 election trump arc de triumph louvre notre dame tour Champs-Élysées place de la concorde Versailles palace train metro berlin new york pittsburgh los angeles bangkok kinshasa mexico city tokyo china megacities megaprojects NBCDiscover Dublin, Irelands Secret to SuccessTDC2024-06-13 | How Dublin, Ireland's capital city, has transformed from one of Europe's poorest cities to one of its wealthiest in just 30 years. NEW EPISODES WEEKLY: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Main Sources: Ireland GDP Growth https://rb.gy/kzop2h Dublin stories w/ Prof David Dickson https://t.ly/_WBWK Partition https://rb.gy/95oufv Dublin wikipedia https://t.ly/p93Hr Why Dublin became a tech hub bit.ly/4cnBpOl Ireland wiki https://t.ly/ap4_4 The Troubles https://t.ly/rvdfA What's weird about Ireland's GDP linkye.net/pk8m Ireland Corp Tax rates https://rb.gy/hfz7jv Healthcare system overhaul https://rb.gy/dh6zia Budget surplus https://rb.gy/dorxl5 Ireland's wind export potential rebrand.ly/7qfbjge European wind generation by country rebrand.ly/5pubvqq Demographics of Ireland (Population and Immigration) rebrand.ly/pvxnt7z Americans with Irish descent https://t.ly/VLNXe
Discover Dublin, Ireland's Secret to Success Welcome to Dublin 0:00 Geography of Dublin 0:36 Vikings settle Ireland 0:53 English take control 1:04 Irish Rebellion 1:30 Partition of Ireland 2:19 Troubles 2:36 Good Friday Agreement 3:10 Economic Boom 3:27 Brexit bonus 4:12 Tax Haven 4:22 US Corporations 5:01 High living standards 5:22 Wind energy potential 6:10 Guinness 6:54 Loses 1/2 population 7:05 31.5 Million Irish Americans 7:22 Immigrants in Ireland 7:37
Music: Hans Johnson "Life Alive - Instrumental" Mahesh Vinayakram "Guruvea Sharanam - Instrumental" Hans Johnson "Human Connection - Instrumental"
Script: The largest city in South India is known as the country’s “Silicon Valley,” and is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plans for rapid technological development through the 2020s. But despite a decade of rule, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party - or BJP - still struggles to win over this vital region. With India’s national election - the largest in history - happening now, let’s take a quick look at some data to better understand this country of 1.4 billion.
Situated on the massive Deccan Plateau at an average elevation 900 meters above sea level, the city known as Bengalūru in its official language, Kannada, has a metropolitan population of 15 million. It is the capital of Karnataka, one of five states in South India, a region that includes two other megacities: Chennai and Hyderabad.
Bangalore’s modern story dates to when the old town surrounding its nearly 600 year-old fort began merging with the British Cantonment into one metropolis, around the time the Indian Institute of Science was founded, sparking the city’s transformation into an innovation hub.
This brings talented scientists, engineers, and business leaders to the southern region, whose companies also benefit from the many ports along its vast coastline. Its five states now account for 20% of India’s total population, but 31% of its Gross Domestic Product, driven by its IT sector [which makes up 66% of the national total]; electronic goods exports [45%] and [nearly 80%] the latest sector sweeping India: Global Capability Centers–where teams of engineers, lawyers, designers perform specialized tasks for multinational corporations.
Together, these sectors have pushed Gross State Domestic Product per person across the South to $3,176 USD a year. That’s more than double the $1,400 ($1,411) across the national capital and nearby states that make up the North Central Culture Zone.
Comparing individual state figures reveals that much of the South is at least three times as prosperous as the two most popular states in India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Only 3.2% of the population in the South lives below the poverty line, whereas 16.8% do in the North Central Zone.
For context, many of these state-to-state differences are on par with gaps between countries in Europe and Africa, and they are mirrored in India’s complex politics. In the last national election in 2019, Prime Minister Modi’s BJP and its coalition dominated the North, but struggled mightily in the South, where they do not currently control any of its state legislatures. This is partly due to a central tenet of the BJP ideology: heavy promotion of Hinduism.
Given that the percentage of Hindu followers is about the same across Northern and Southern states, with the exception of places like Kerala, this seems like it would be a winning strategy everywhere, indicates that Hinduism is less central to people’s identities there. For example, Hindi is the official language in every state in the North Central Culture Zone, but not in any of the five states of the South.City of Bridges: Pittsburghs vast infrastructureTDC2024-04-11 | Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges, has a vast infrastructure that needs constant maintenance. I interviewed Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald to learn how it keeps up.
This is the only city in America with an entrance: Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges. Nestled in the rugged terrain of Allegheny County, Pittsburgh lies at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, giving birth to the mighty Ohio. Three sisters Roberto Clemente, artist Andy Warhol, and conservationist Rachel Carson. Today, a total of 446 bridges exist in the city of Pittsburgh City of Pittsburgh’s Fern Hollow bridge County Executive, Rich Fitzgerald Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Marcellus Shale - the largest natural gas find The University of Pittsburgh Oakland, Schenley Park Phipps Conservatory, is home to the Center for Sustainable Landscapes–the first and only building to meet seven of the highest green certifications Carnegie Mellon University ranked number one in engineering, robotics, and computer science Robotics, AI, software Pitt medical technology, the biotechnology, the life sciences autonomous vehicle sector Aurora driverless trucking product on a route between Houston and Dallas ‘Robotics Row’ Googles, the Facebooks, the Microsofts Great Allegheny Passage C&O Canal trail in Maryland along the Potomac and can take you all the way into Washington DC drop in air pollution electric transit buses Pittsburgh International airport Lochs and dams, as the water goes over it’s going to turn a turbine. It’s going to generate electricity for our lights and for our buildings–whether it’s the jail, whether it's our nursing homes, whether it’s our county office building - the courthouse - all of the various things that we operate. Net zero parksThe Worst Greenhouse Gasses And The Mission To Destroy ThemTDC2024-02-28 | One company's quest to find and destroy CFCs, HCFCs, and HFC refrigerants - and methane-leaking wells - as fast as possible. These gases superheat the atmosphere much more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2). Tradewater: tradewater.us/offsetnow Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
0:00 The Problem 1:00 Acquiring Refrigerants 3:40 The Destruction Process 4:49 Founding Tradewater 5:30 A Climate-First Mission 6:35 Going International 8:26 Capping Methane Leaks
Script: The secret sauce inside this heat pump, your fridge, and air conditioner, is the refrigerant that circulates inside, expanding and compressing to move heat from one space to another.
But if this chemical escapes it’s a problem because it heats the atmosphere much more than an equivalent amount of Carbon Dioxide. [show how many times CO2]
So, when an appliance reaches the end of its life cycle, the refrigerant is - hopefully - recovered into canisters that often get left around to degrade and leak.
[Show clip from Honduras of canister leaking]
Few people understand how big of a disaster it is when this happens.
Luckily, the most potent warming gasses are no longer produced or are being phased down, but because there’s no easy way to properly get rid of it, there are probably many million appliances and tanks full of it still out there.
Fortunately, one company has made it their mission to hunt down these canisters - these climate grenades - and safely disarm them.
To learn more, I visited them in Chicago.
“There’s no regulatory obligation to destroy this stuff, and that’s a role we can come in and help fill.”
Valeria leads a team that travels across America finding refrigerants and paying people cash for them. She took me along on a quick local pick-up.
We didn’t want to freak the customer out by filming them in front of their house, but back at the warehouse, I saw the goods.
Inside, I found Moises working on the next step.
How refrigerant gases are destroyed.
The team stores the refrigerants in these larger tanks until they’ve aggregated enough to fill this beast.
That happens at a facility like this one that superheats the refrigerant.
“Rotary kiln incineration…we are literally burning this gas to break down the chemical bonds and rendering the component parts essentially inert.”
When I sat down with Tradewater’s founders at Jackson Park, I learned this work started on a much smaller scale.
[Explaining carbon offset credit, California Cap and Trade, and how the company makes money]
[Gabe discusses how refrigerants are usually collected and destroyed, and how TW’s climate-first approach is different]
[Tim discussing growth]
With its US operation set up and scaling quickly, the team is working internationally to make an even bigger impact, but that comes with some serious challenges.
[Gabe on navigating each country’s different systems]
Back in the US, Tradewater has begun partnering with state governments to stop another dangerous gas from escaping: the methane spewing out of millions of uncapped, orphaned oil and gas wells, emissions that have a warming potential 81.2 times that of CO2 over a 20 year period.
The team is leveraging the skills of former oil and gas industry workers who get this specialized job done right.
[These gasses cannot be sequestered once released]
Thanks for watching, make sure you’re subscribed here to catch the next climate solution I profile.Chicago: An aerial tour of America’s best park systemTDC2024-02-11 | An aerial tour of Chicago the "City in a Garden," whose park system is considered the most important in the country. Watch Part 1: youtu.be/pNdX0Dm-J8Y Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
0:00 Intro 0:12 Millennium Park 1:14 Boulevards 1:37 30 miles of waterfront parks 1:55 Italian touring cyclist 2:44 Obama Presidential Library location 3:39 View from 1,000 feet up 4:20 Meigs Field Battle 5:45 Park history 6:56 Jane Addams 7:20 Fieldhouses 7:41 Cook County Forest Preserves 8:32 Riverwalk
The most popular park in the city is Millennium Park, which opened in 2004. It features the seamless, liquid mercury-inspired Cloud Gate sculpture that locals affectionately call “The Bean,” the 11,000-capacity Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn, and a hybrid video-fountain sculpture. The brainchild of Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley, sits atop parking garages and a major commuter rail terminal–making it the world's largest rooftop garden.
Surrounding downtown is Chicago’s system of boulevards–the first comprehensive greenway in a major US city. Linking numerous parks, these wide, grass and treelined streets were designed for leisurely strolls, cycles, or drives, and they help explain Chicago’s motto: “City in a garden.” And then, of course, there’s the one feature that truly sets Chicago apart: nearly every inch of its 30-mile lakefront is a park.
Right nearby is the site of the nearly complete Obama Presidential Center, which is rising in the southside neighborhood of Hyde Park, right next to the Museum of Science and Industry–the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere and one of the only buildings remaining from the 1893 Fair. The Obamas’ presidential library, like their home for 8 years in DC, is adjacent to a long public lawn, the Midway Plaisance, which connects Jackson Park with Washington Park to the west, forming one of the largest continuous urban public spaces in the country.
In fact, Washington Park’s large open green was where the Olympic stadium would have been if the city had succeeded in its bid for the 2016 Summer Games.
The Midway also runs through the University of Chicago, one of the best colleges in the world.
But one of the most ideal vantage points for viewing Chicago’s public lands is from the top of 875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly known as the John Hancock Center. Nothing beats viewing the world in 360 degrees from 1,000 feet up, even if the air was thick with smoke from wildfires in Canada. Turns out, it took a bizarre showdown between Mayor Daley and the Federal Aviation Administration to remove the last major hurdle blocking uninterrupted access to Lake Michigan.
For years, the city had been trying to close a small airport called Meigs Field on Northerly Island, which - after 9/11 - it also viewed as a clear security threat. Yet these efforts were repeatedly blocked by the FAA. So in the middle of the night in 2003, Mayor Daley took matters into his own hands.
Daley’s 22 years in office easily make him the Chicagoan whose impact is most felt in the city today. This incident sums up his bold, action-oriented leadership style.
Chicago Parks District historian Julia Bachrach.
Virgil K. Brown and Jane Addams. Her famous settlement house started as an effort to help poor immigrants in her Chicago neighborhood but grew into one of the most powerful social reform movements in history.
Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize Chicago’s fieldhouses. These park buildings are for the community to gather or exercise, no matter the weather.
Another amenity in the surrounding counties is the Forest Preserves, an unrivaled network of prairies, woods, and wetlands.
“People in the city don’t really know about the forest preserves. They’re kind of a wonderful green emerald ring around the city. The forest preserves are owned by the taxpayers and it's about 69,000 acres - 11% of our land - it’s a wonderful, wonderful asset.” Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle
It’s now the largest urban preserve in the United States.
Chicago RiverwalkChicago: City of the FutureTDC2024-01-27 | Chicago has always been a futuristic city on the cutting edge. Today, it is at the epicenter of quantum research; nuclear energy (the nation's leading producer); logistics (hub of the entire United States); culture (the capital of Black America); and the battle against rising coastlines and urban flooding. Watch Part 1 Now youtu.be/pNdX0Dm-J8Y Part 2 youtu.be/V9LQ2oWZlZI Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
True to its innovative spirit, the Chicago area is home to several cutting-edge industries, like the emerging field of quantum technology.
Fermilab is America’s premier particle physics research facility, Argonne National Laboratory, connected by a fiber-optic cable to the University of Chicago. Scientists there are trying to apply atomic principles to improve communications and computing.
Four of the ten quantum labs in the United States are located in Illinois, which receives roughly four of every 10 dollars the federal government invests.
Illinois also produces far more nuclear power than anywhere else in America. 75% of Chicago’s electricity needs are now met by the state’s 11 reactors.
Chicago was where the dawn of the Nuclear Age happened, as America’s Manhattan Project raced the Germans during World War 2.
It did just that on December 2, 1942, when Enrico Fermi’s team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a facility hidden underground on campus.
Waves of European immigrants during the 1800s made the city’s population 98.1% white in 1900. But over the next 60 years, in a period known as The Great Migration, six million African Americans left the South to settle in Chicago and other cities in the North.
By the 1990s, Chicago's South Side and its adjoining suburbs had become the largest African American majority region in the country, fostering all sorts of talent, from academics, activists, and rappers, to global icons like Michael Jordan (arguably the most successful American pro athlete), Oprah Winfrey (the richest African American of the 20th century), and the Obamas.
Create projects. 70 rail improvement projects are in various stages of completion, with more than two dozen already finished. Renovating Union Station.
With 8 lines, the amount of metal required to build the L turbo-charged Chicago’s steelmaking industry. During World War 2, it nimbly shifted to producing bombs, jeeps, tanks, and planes, and was a vital contributor to the Allied cause, producing more tons of the super-strong metal than the entire United Kingdom every year from 1939 to 1945, and all of Germany from 1943 to 1945.
The city has transformed itself into the Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics leader of the world’s largest consumer economy. Vast warehouses are clustered all along the canal and river, around its many large railyards, and to the west of O’Hare–the world’s second-busiest airport in terms of aircraft movements per day.
Since the 1970’s it has been adding massive tunnels, cavernous holding chambers, and gigantic lagoons like this one–a repurposed old mine. When this latest round of extreme engineering capacity to store 20 billion gallons
Lower Wacker Drive to flood and key buildings like Willis Tower to lose power.
Part 3 1 2 4Chicago: The Worlds Fastest Growing CityTDC2024-01-02 | Destroyed by its Great Fire, Chicago quickly rebuilt, constructing the world's first skyscraper, becoming the fastest-growing city in human history, and hosting the 1893 World's Fair (Columbian Exposition) that changed America. Part 1: youtu.be/pNdX0Dm-J8Y Subscribe to TDC for Part 3: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Special thanks to Paul Durica and the Chicago History Museum chicagohistory.org
Heading into the last quarter of the 1800s, no city on earth was better positioned for commercial dominance than this one. The capital of the Midwest had just fueled the Union’s victory in the Civil War, and its high concentration of industries situated along its many rail lines, vast lakefront, and re-engineered river was attracting thousands of new arrivals every month. But in their rush to expand as quickly as possible, its builders had inadvertently made conditions just right for disaster.
This is part two of the making of modern Chicago, once the fastest-growing city in history.
As we learned in Part 1, Chicago was the world’s largest market for lumber. Not only did it supply its rapidly increasing population with boards and planks for their homes, but it also stored huge quantities of wood awaiting shipment to towns popping up all over the western prairies.
After an extremely dry summer, on an October night in 1871, a strong wind blew into Chicago from the west. Mystery still surrounds exactly what happened next, but somehow a fire started in a barn and quickly spread to other structures.
The wooden city went up like a tinderbox. To escape, thousands of terrified residents waded into the lake and stayed there all night. Over 17,000 buildings and 73 miles of streets were suddenly gone. Incredibly, only about 300 people perished, but over 100,000 were instantly homeless–a third of the city’s population. It was one of the worst fire disasters in modern history.
The same windstorm fueled major fires all around the Great Lakes, most tragically in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a town engulfed so suddenly that 2,500 died and 1.5 million acres of surrounding forest burned. Cut off from the rest of the world when its telegraph lines were charred, and eclipsed by the magnitude of property loss in Chicago, the little-known Peshtigo fire is still the deadliest blaze in American history.
I visited with the Chicago History Museum’s Director of Exhibitions to learn more.
The start of the skyscraper age has transformed not only this city, but our entire planet. Today, Chicago still ranks among the tallest and densest skylines in the world.
Amidst of this swirl of activity, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition, also known as the World’s Fair, in 1893. Built on over 600 acres of former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park, the fairgrounds drew 27.5 million visitors over 6 months at a time when the population of the entire country was just over 60 million. Its exhibits projected American optimism, boosted Chicago’s image as the country’s industrial capital, and had a profound cultural influence: especially in architecture and the arts. Just 20 years after the fire, Chicago had rebuilt to make its debut on the biggest stage.
Erik Larson documented the feverish preparations for opening day in the book, The Devil in the White City, which tells the true story of the prominent architect in charge of realizing the fair’s grand vision.
“To build the fair, Daniel Burnham had confronted a legion of obstacles, any one of which could have - should have - stopped it long before Opening Day. Some wept at its beauty…Whole villages had been imported from Egypt, Algeria, Dahomey, and other far-flung locales, along with their inhabitants. The Street in Cairo exhibit alone employed nearly two hundred Egyptians…Everything about the fair was exotic and, above all, immense. A single exhibit hall had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, all at the same time.”
At the time of the fire in the early 1870s, the city had a population of about 300,000…but by the time of the 1893 World's Fair, Chicago had grown to a city of over a million residents–it had surpassed Philadelphia as the second largest city in the country. At that point in time no city in the history of the world had gotten big so quickly as Chicago. It actually became the fourth largest city by population in the entire world. By the end of the 1890s you had London, New York, Paris, Chicago. Those were the four largest global cities with Tokyo right behind Chicago at number five.Chicago: Boomtown to Modern MarvelTDC2023-12-18 | Chicago is the crown jewel of the post-industrial United States with a metropolitan population of 9.5 million. It triumphed over nature to become a boomtown and railroad hub. Now, its economy is considered the most balanced and resilient on earth. This is the building of Chicago, a modern marvel at the crossroads of America. Part 2 youtu.be/V9LQ2oWZlZI
Main clip sources: WTTW Chicago's local PBS station youtube.com/@wttw
This futuristic urban river canyon reflects a staggering amount of resources, capital, and innovation. It’s also America’s railroad hub and the central node in America’s extensive system of navigable freshwater ways. Its roads lead to most corners of the continent, and its runways send direct flights to over 200 destinations–all of this supports one of the planet’s most productive regions for growing crops and extracting raw materials. The opportunities available in and around this prairie boomtown have attracted hungry young workers for nearly two centuries. In fact, so many arrived daily that it sustained the highest population growth rate on earth for several consecutive decades in the late 1800s.
Its story began when a Haitian-born fur trader [Jean Baptiste DeSalle] and his wife [Kitihawa], a member of the local indigenous Potawatomi tribe, established an outpost here in 1779.
It remained a sleepy frontier village for decades until Chicago’s first locomotive, the Pioneer, made its inaugural trip out to nearby Des Plaines in 1848.
I learned about this pivotal moment firsthand when I visited the Chicago History Museum for a trip back in time with Paul Durica.
These products were listed in mail-order catalogs, an industry invented and based in Chicago. The conveniences of online shopping can be traced directly back to Montgomery Ward and Sears–businesses that were only possible because the railroad reliably delivered.
By the beginning of the 20th century. Chicago had close to 40 different railroad lines running through it. Most cities today will have like maybe one Union Station or a central terminal–but by the early 1900s, Chicago had six different ones.
Chicago was also responsible for the rapid growth of the vast prairies that stretched westward to the Rocky Mountains. A Chicagoan had invented the mechanical reaper, freeing wheat farmers from the backbreaking, inefficient work of harvesting their crops by hand. And when they shipped their wheat into the city, 12 massive grain elevators stored it before it was sent across the lake to Buffalo, or downriver and onto oceanliners waiting in New Orleans.
But even with this bounty, prairie farmers couldn’t build much of anything, because their lands had few trees to harvest. Good thing there were expansive forests in Wisconsin and Michigan north of Chicago, and soon it became the world’s largest lumber market.
“The Union Stockyard in many ways is the kind of natural culmination of how the city's been growing and developing because it's all about centralization and expanding markets.
Hundreds of millions of calories were passing through the processing plants and storage facilities of Chicago every single day, feeding the ravenous Union Army in its hard-fought victory in the Civil War.
“Chicago is situated magnificently for trade, but it’s a pestilential swamp–it’s a horrible place for a city. It’s an absolute hellhole… Children were playing with maggots as if they were little pets.”
Before long, Cholera had crept up the Mississippi to extinguish 60 Chicagoans a day during the warm summer months.
To find a solution, Chicago brought in Ellis Chesbrough, one of America’s brightest sanitation engineers. He designed gravity-fed sewers to flush the waste into the river, and then deepened the river by dredging it and using the fill to raise Chicago’s ground level 10 feet. Lifting all the existing buildings safely required widespread adoption of a new system: George Pullman’s jack.
“So, how could you reverse the flow? Well, you must realize that the land form drops off. You get down to the city of Joliet and you’re 40 feet below Lake Michigan. The idea was to link up the south branch of the Chicago River with the Des Plaines river and to break through that subcontinental divide.
When they had finally finished the Chicago Shipping and Sanitation Canal, and were ready to let the water in, they still weren’t positive it would even work. After a few tense moments, amazingly, the water began to flow slowly downhill.
0:00 Welcome to Chicago 1:20 A Sleepy Frontier Town 2:04 Railroads Help Industry Takes Off 3:10 Prarie Boomtown 5:00 Union Stockyards 6:24 The Battle Against Cholera 7:10 Chicago's Innovative Water System 9:02 Reversing the River 11:12 Outro: Part 1 of 4Master Mechanic Recycles Bikes | Good WorkTDC2023-08-29 | Master mechanic Matthew Fox only sells used, refurbished bikes--providing an affordable service while reducing consumer waste and emissions. He also tours the world on his bicycle. Recycles Bikes Frederick, MD recyclesbicycleshop.com YouTube/wizard onthetrail (Nick and Matt's Iceland adventure documentary) youtube.com/watch?v=t_4izGMs37s Watch Matt perform a tune-up and talk business youtu.be/wuuLqWm-AV8
My name is Matthew Fox, and I own and operate ReCycles Bikes in downtown Frederick . This just kind of makes sense, there's used car dealerships all over the place but not so much for bikes. I get a lot of people that walk in and they're usually I want to say 50 percent of people are brand new to cycling and they're looking to dip their feet into it. That's kind of the whole idea of my business model is a lot of people would get sticker shock going into a new bike shop. The entry level bikes are starting to look more like $700 $800 $1,000 dollars.
In the spring of 2013 I ended up picking up a bike at a yard sale and I think for $125 dollars I cleaned it up, took a couple pictures of it, put it on Craigslist for $250 the whole time thinking to myself I just wasted $125 dollars. Like, this isn't gonna work. Sold it that same evening that I listed it. $125 dollars is a big deal to a sophomore in college who typically has to work 13 or 14 hours to make that much. There was still not that trigger of like this is a business idea. It wasn't until I turned over a few dozen bikes that I realized, if I really upped my mechanical skills then there's this whole way way way more inventory out there that could be picked up for way less because it's not currently in rideable condition. I actually took a step back from selling on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace to double down on my hours in the shop, taking advantage of the fact that they have thousands of bikes coming through a year. And then I think it was late 2016 I ended up making a name and a website, ordered some business cards on Vistaprint, and started treating it more as like an organized thing.
The next year in 2018 I did Japan and South Korea,
And then that week out I'm like 'nobody in Japan speaks English' according to this Google Search that I'm doing right now seven days before. 'What's gonna happen if I get sick or I need help?'
Google Maps behaves differently in different countries. So I did New Zealand next. The thing that was strange about this was I did it in January 2020. So halfway through this trip I start hearing rumors about COVID, and didn't think anything of it. And I was searching and I found that there were 8,000 cases of COVID worldwide, and I sent it to my dad and I said, 'please stop worrying about this, I'm going to be fine, it's no big deal.' I don't know if he remembers that, but maybe he'll see that on this video and say, 'it was kind of a big deal.' I flew back early February 2020 and I guess things really kind of hit a boiling point about 30 days after that. There was a period of time where I was very seriously considering doing a global 18-month trip. In fact, when I signed my first lease, the timing on that was such that that's what I was going to do on the tail end, which I've not told too many people that. But I definitely decided against it. I think if I was gone for 18 months that would actually take more from me than it would give me because I would just- there'd be too many things I'd miss back home. Did you have a path? Yes. OK. I had a path, and I had a month-by-month, and I had to do a ton of research on like, 'OK, where- what's going to make sense?' You kind of have to suffer at some point because it's like there's some things you just can't do. Like Australia in Peak summer--you can't bike across Australia in peak summer. Well, I mean somebody probably has, but I wasn't planning on doing it. I was gonna go East because of the prevailing winds globally tend to be more of a tailwind. And I was going to start by going across Europe, Turkey, the Caspian Sea, the 'Stans, and then kind of horizontally across China, and then down through southeast Asia, ending in Singapore. I was gonna fly from Singapore to Perth, across the southern edge of Australia, and then I was undecided on if I would repeat Japan or New Zealand or just fly from Sydney to Los Angeles and then finish the trip from there. But it was going to take probably about 15 months...
I think I mostly got the idea from watching too many YouTube videos. There's a guy named Ed Pratt that did about that route--and he did it on a unicycle if you can believe that. Bryce: I cannot. Matt: But yeah, I could literally talk about trips like all day.
Mumbai, India, Delhi, Manila, Jakarta, Tokyo, Megacities, Megacity, TDC, Organic Farmer Farming, Barack Obama gets baby to stop crying, Hasan Minaj Correspondents' Dinner, Kinshasa, Los Angeles, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington DC refurbished usedMumbai: Indias Transforming MEGACITYTDC2023-07-20 | Mumbai, India’s Transforming MEGACITY is home to five transportation megaprojects under construction throughout this city of 25 million. This short documentary explores each piece of infrastructure and the larger goal of transforming Mumbai, India’s entertainment and financial capital, into a powerful megaregion by the middle of the century.
The megaprojects: Mumbai Metro, Coastal Road, Sewri-Worli Elevated Corridor flyover, Trans Harbour Link, and Navi Mumbai International Airport.
This is Mumbai, the transforming megacity. Surrounded by the Arabian sea, Mumbai - which means “mother” in Marathi, the local language - is the heart of the state of Maharashtra.
Narendra Modi
0:00 Welcome to Mumbai 0:37 Origins of the Megacity 1:58 Port of Mumbai 2:25 Immigration overwhelms infrastructure 3:30 Mumbai Metro 6:30 City layout 7:08 Coastal road 9:30 Seri-Worli connector 10:17 Trans Harbour Link 10:53 Navi Mumbai International Airport 11:11 Mumbai Metropolitan Region 11:52 The tradeoffs to development: preserving GoraiMeet the Master Organic Veggie Farmer | Good WorkTDC2023-05-24 | Emma Jagoz's Moon Valley Farm is a leader in the organic, sustainable food movement--growing her garden on a single acre into a 70-acre vegetable farm in Frederick County, Maryland. moonvalleyfarm.net youtube.com/@moon_valley_farm
Transcript: When I tasted the food that I grew it tasted way better than the stuff in the grocery store. So much of you what you get in the grocery store is hydroponic and it really doesn't taste like that much. So real soil grown organic food tastes so good and I really wanted to share that with people who didn't have the capacity like I did at the time. So I started the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program because I thought it was super cool. I love the CSA concept.
I started in my parent's backyard in Baltimore County...own organic system plan.... 25 acres in Frederick County. The benefit of having my own land was the ability to invest in infrastructure....We grow crops in two different ways: we direct sow them into the ground and we transplant them. With transplants we can really get a jump on the season, and the weeds, and disease as well, and pest pressure by keeping them in a controlled environment before we put them in the ground.
We have a germination chamber that puts the seedlings at the correct temperature so that we get really good germination. Aand then we grow them out in here. These are all our Peppers we have a bunch of different kinds of herbs here. You can see this fancy kind of Basil is that purple. We've got cilantro and lettuces and a bunch of brassicas. So we're growing an array of specialty crops here. I like to say 'specialty is our specialty.' This is our water wheel transplanter. These get filled with water and also some fertilizer. All of those trays that you saw in the greenhouse sit here, and up here, and here. That's mushroom compost that we get from farms in Pennsylvania. I don't know if you know that Pennsylvania is the mushroom capital of the world. All of our equipment is set up for this bed system. So all the tractors have the same tire width, so that they fit on either side of this bed. Which means that we can not only prep the soil, and put the compost, put the nutrients, create a bed, transplant, but then we can also cultivate. Bryce: Are you able to reuse a lot of this plastic? Emma: No.
Right now the national organic program does not allow
biodegradable plastics to be used on an organic operation. So we do have to remove them each year and
throw them away in order to keep our organic certification.
We have an apiary here (beekeeping)
They pollinate our crops and so they help us get better yields because more of the flowers are pollinated. They've been working day and night on creating new boxes, and making splits, and they're also catching swarms in the area.
Swarms are really really docile so even though there's bees all over you you can just walk right into them and they're not going to sting you because bees only sting to protect their house, but when they're swarming they're looking for a new home.
We also invest in our soil, that's a really big one. By treating our soil like it is the key to human survival, which it very much is. And that does require a long-term approach. We're able to weather harsher conditions by investing in organic matter and all of the different nutrients that the soil needs to really increase its ability to hold and drain water. It's one of the most important things I feel like I'm doing taking conventional land and regeneratively farming it and nurturing it back organically is not easy, and that's the situation this planet is in. Somebody's gotta roll up the sleeves and do the hard work and that is farmers. Creating a really resilient food system based on our local economy is how we're gonna thrive in a time of climate change. I just don't see global pandemics, and supplies chain disruptions, and wars or political strife putting us to continually relying on international or across-the-nation food for our daily subsistence. Now that we're several seasons in and actually acquiring more land. So we're on 25 acres, but this year we're actually going to be on 40 acres, and next year we're going to be on 70.
epic gardening, market farm, market garden, answer, farm tour, garden tour, urban farming, organic gardening, gardening tips, gardening 101, garden, plants, how to , edible gardening, frederick Maryland, washington dc, white house, sustainable, compost, local, csa, agriculture, vegetable gardening, just a few acres farm, business, Baltimore, Maryland, beekeeping, TDC, megacity, delhi, obama, Mumbai, London, moon valley farm, emma jagoz, Homegrown Handgathered, greenhouse, climate, resilient Frederick county, food, farmer, women, woman, she, her, kirsten dirksenManila: MEGACITY of the PhilippinesTDC2023-03-08 | Visit brilliant.org/TDC for 20% off your annual subscription! Manila is the capital of the Philippines and the largest city in the 7,641-island country. Subscribe for new MEGACITY episodes! youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
One of the most beautiful countries is also one of the most dangerous. Not only have decades of unsteady leadership followed centuries of foreign occupation, but its capital is the most vulnerable urban area to natural disasters on Earth. Conditions have become so challenging that the national government may leave. But most of the 25 million people living here will stay and carry on, as is their way. Fortunately, some major improvements are in the works. This is Manila, the island megacity.
There is no subway here, only very limited above-ground rail, and a bus network that mostly consists of uncomfortable Jeepney’s. So everyone who can afford to drives, creating the most gridlocked city in Asia, if not the world. Commute times can reach an unfathomable six hours roundtrip. That’s how long it takes Emico to navigate the multiple stages of her commute into her office in Metro Manila each morning and back home to Rizal each night, even though they are just 19 kilometers apart.
The situation - thankfully - is improving. Thousands of electrified Jeepnys have hit the road, and construction has begun on what locals call the “Project of the Century”--the Metro Manila Subway. When fully operational in 2028 it could serve more than 1.5 million trips a day.
But not all developers have abandoned Manila. The new Bonifacio Global City that has gone up over the last two decades provides a safe, clean bubble for foreigners and wealthy Filipinos. By looks and design, it seems to rival many of the world’s other new luxurious steel and glass cities. Of course, similar to Delhi’s Gurgaon, it is mostly walled off from the extreme poverty existing just meters away.
Chapters: 0:00 Welcome to Manila 0:40 Geography of the capital 0:57 Spanish Manila 1:23 Philippine independence movement 2:08 War with the United States 3:22 American design 4:00 Manila in WW2 4:42 Modern Manila's challenges 6:06 Transportation system 6:30 A six-hour roundtrip commute 7:00 Metro Manila Subway 7:22 Most vulnerable city to natural disasters 7:55 Government moving to New Clark City 8:15 Bonifacio Global City
Manila, the Philippines' MEGACITY: History of an Island Capital Manila, the Philippines' MEGACITY: Capital of 7,641 IslandsChengdu, China’s New Blueprint MEGACITYTDC2023-02-09 | Southwest China’s largest metropolis and one of its greenest big cities has a population of 21 million. Chengdu exemplifies Beijing’s quest to modernize the country’s vast interior and is the lynchpin of an emerging eco-friendly mega-region in Sichuan province.
Scenic mountains ring the fertile basin of Sichuan province, a land known for its agricultural abundance and famous cuisine of chili-infused sauces and spicy hot pot. Its capital has been continuously inhabited for more than 3,000 years, the only major city in China to have an unchanged name and location throughout the imperial, republican, and communist eras–a history that remains remarkably well preserved.
In the second century BC, Chengdu was one of Earth’s largest civilizations, with 350,000 inhabitants. In the 11th century, the world’s first widely used paper money was created here. Unfortunately, things turned bleak in the 1500s when its residents were nearly all destroyed by a murderous Mongol invasion. For decades afterward, Chengdu remained so sparsely populated that wild tigers freely roamed its streets.
During the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Chengdu was the last stronghold in the country for the forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China before their evacuation to Taiwan. In spite of its short-lived status as the capital, the city attracted loyal business people, workers, and academics–an influx of talent that founded many of the industries and institutions that continue to make Chengdu the premiere cultural and economic center of Southwest China.
In the year 2000, Beijing launched the “Open Up The West Program” to encourage immigration from its wealthy coastal regions and spread prosperity to its 12 poorest areas in the west. As an established metropolis, Chengdu has been a major winner under the policy. Its population has doubled over the last 25 years while becoming one of China’s most dynamic cities. Between 2010 and 2022 105 highrises over 100 meters were completed, catapulting it to 12th on the list of the world’s tallest metropolises. But high-density construction is happening all across China. What’s special about Chengdu is the amount of land local officials have set aside for parks, paths, and athletic facilities, an effort to make it as livable as possible.
President Xi has officially designated it China’s Park City Demonstration Area. Municipal leaders even brought in experts from the United Nations to better understand how ecological development can solve some of Chengdu’s most pressing challenges. One ultimate goal is to create the world’s largest continuous network of paths by 2050 by reserving 500 meters on either side of its largest ring highway, a project that will eventually produce 188 square kilometers of parks.
Chapters: 0:00 Welcome to Chengdu 0:23 Geography of Sichuan province 0:54 History of Chengdu 2:00 Chengdu's emergence 2:39 Becoming a megacity 3:20 World's largest network of paths 4:02 World's Largest Building: New Century Global Center 5:10 China's emerging megaregions 5:55 The emerging Chengdu-Chongqing megaregion 6:37 Dirty air 6:54 Water, drought, and electricity crisis
The world’s southernmost megacity is among the best places to live in Latin America. With nearly 17 million people, it’s one of those rare metropolises that can feel like the center of the universe. But there's also a sense that this city once came close to achieving true greatness, but has fallen well short. This is Buenos Aires, the remote megacity.
The University of Buenos Aires is one of the best in South America. It has produced four Nobel Prize winners and provides taxpayer-funded education to students from all over the world.
Argentina also has nearly 20 million tons of identified lithium reserves in the Andean plains. This metal is a central component in the batteries of EVs and mobile devices, a resource worth more than $1 trillion to Argentina in the next two decades alone.
In fact, the beloved Pope Francis is a born and bred Porteño.
The city’s other religion is futból. With at least 24 clubs, Buenos Aires has the highest concentration of pro teams in the world and is home to the 2022 world cup champions.
Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 0:29 Geography of Buenos Aires 0:40 Founding of the megacity 1:20 Colony of Spain 1:48 Revolution for independence 2:17 Buenos Aires becomes a global city 2:54 Rapid population growth 3:18 A European-style capital 4:09 The Party Ends 5:13 Rise of Juan and Eva "Evita" Peron 6:08 Political and economic struggles continue 6:41 A lot to feel good about 7:03 Improved life in slums 7:20 University of Buenos Aires 7:32 Argentina's lithium mining boom 8:08 Argentina's religion: Futbol (soccer) 8:16 2022 World Cup Champions (Messi) 8:27 An intellectual capital 8:52 Spectacular National Cultural Center 9:15 Champions of individual rights 9:25 Autonomous city 9:56 Areas for improvement (parks and energy grid stability) 10:43 Brilliant sponsorship
Juan Peron Eva Duarte Evita Peron Porteno Porteño Porteña Universidad de Buenos Aires Lionel Messi Maradona Yerba Mate tea nightlife walk 4k plaza de mayo villas miseria beef meat Juan De Garay fair winds mendoza subte subway asuncion Juan Manuel de Rosas province unification ranchero conventillos Italy spain Portugal Portuguese france germany president Madrid Barcelona colectivos bus police partidos Pope Francis Bolivia Ecuador Medellin Chile Santiago AntarcticaIran’s Complicated MEGACITY: TehranTDC2022-11-29 | Tehran is the capital of Iran, the world’s only significant theocracy, and the largest city in West Asia, with a population of 15 million.
Chapters 0:00 Episode teaser 0:45 Geography of Iran 1:04 Tehran becomes the capital 1:31 Rise of Reza Khan 1:55 Reza Shah modernizes Iran 2:28 Shah makes enemies 2:59 Britain and the Soviets invade 3:21 CIA MI6 coup to oust Mossaddegh 3:51 Reign of Shah Pahlavi 4:01 Rise of Ayahtollah Ruhollah Khomeini 4:14 1979 Islamic Revolution 4:33 Iran's current government 5:00 Millions flee brutal government to America & Europe 5:27 Khomeini makes enemies with the US: the hostage crisis 5:45 Saddam Hussein's Iraq invades Iran 5:58 Mass immigration to Tehran 6:12 Iran's poor economy 6:34 Failed nuclear program 6:46 Huge renewable energy potential 7:04 Vulnerability to climate change: heat waves and drought 7:37 Tehran's megaprojects: metro, fast internet, sewer and water 8:02 Tabiat bridge 8:10 Youth of Tehran push for revolution 8:39 Government struggles to contain protests 8:53 Unprecedented actions by and against school children 9:05 Crossing the point of no return 9:15 What's next?
Located in west Asia, Iran has eight foreign borders and access to the ocean through the gulfs off its southern coast. Most of the country’s 87 million people live in the northwest, where it's cooler on the steppes of mountains home to the highest peak in Western Asia–Mount Damavand. In 1786, this land became the 32nd capital in the history of Persia, closer to areas in the north that had fallen under the influence of Russia and Britain.
Iran is highly vulnerable to the climate change temperature rise of 1.8 degrees C - that’s one-and-a-half times the mean global rise of 1.2 degrees. Prolonged drought that’s decimated its water supply and turned thousands of villages into ghost towns as surrounding farmland goes dry.
Several major projects have been completed in the capital. Tehran now has the largest metro system in the Middle East. Six cent ticket prices and a daily ridership of 3 million are improving its terrible traffic and air pollution. Internet speed and penetration has increased 10-fold; Tehran’s new, integrated sewer and water treatment system is 90% operational; and it’s internationally-celebrated Tabiat bridge.
The current Supreme Leader is an 83-year old in questionable health guiding a regime struggling to contain protests led by women demanding full rights that are inspiring millions to demand a functioning economy.
I profiled London last time and am exploring Buenos Aires, Argentina next.
USA vs. Iran Highlights | 2022 FIFA World CupLondon: The Empire MEGACITYTDC2022-11-16 | London is the capital of the United Kingdom and was the world’s largest city until 1925. Once the center of the massive British Empire, it is now a mature, well-planned metropolis with a population of 13.7 million.
Chapters: 0:00 Episode teaser 1:01 Roman Londinium 1:38 Westminster Abbey and Palace 2:07 City of London fly-in 2:23 Royal Exchange 2:47 Tower of London 3:10 Great London Fire of 1666 4:33 World-Class creative culture of the 1600s 4:53 Coffee Houses: hot bed's of innovation 5:19 The Royal Society 5:34 Lloyd's of London and the world's first great capitalist economy 6:10 British Empire 6:32 Trafalgar 6:59 Largest City in the World 7:16 Cleaning up London with a modern sewer system 7:44 Building the Underground 8:18 Suburban sprawl into the countryside 8:55 Greenbelt 9:25 The Blitz and rebuilding London 10:04 A city of immigrants 11:05 Brexit 11:45 Heatwaves and climate change 12:05 Thames Barrier and sea level rise 12:35 Coming water shortages? 13:30 A bright future
UK Funeral Concert Arsenal Chelsea Tottenham Spurs Liverpool Manchester queen adele beatles elton john ed sheerhan world cup Houses of Parliament world-famous Buckingham Palace
In this London video, I show you why London, England is the empire capital. Let me know what you think in the comments below!
London, England's MEGACITY: The Empire Capital
London, UK is the capital of the United Kingdom and one of the world's major cities. Renowned for its arts and culture, lively nightlife, and world-renowned universities.Jakarta, Indonesia: Racing to Save the Worlds 2nd Largest MEGACITYTDC2022-08-25 | Jakarta is the world's second-largest city and the capital of Indonesia, but it is sinking into the sea. This is the race to save it.
Jakarta, Indonesia's MEGACITY: The World's Second Largest City
Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 1:11 Welcome to Jakarta 2:55 'Urban planning gone horribly wrong' 3:09 History of Jakarta 3:56 Suharto comes to power 4:30 Land subsidence explained 4:56 Sinking 3x faster 5:29 Historic flooding 6:32 Raising their homes 7:15 The problems with channelization 8:34 Floodplain development 9:15 Kampungs resettlement 10:55 The rising sea 11:47 Great Garuda Sea Wall Megaproject 12:48 A New Capital: Nusantara 14:11 Questions surrounding Nusantara 15:19 A City worth saving 16:21 Piped water for all 16:58 Creating more greenspace 17:30 Building an aquatic metropolis 18:07 Floodproof homes 19:12 Tiny homes on stilts 19:44 How Kampung Tongkal was saved
Indonesia new law parliament bali ache criminalize Indonesia bans outside marriage as parliament passes sweeping new criminal codeThe World’s Biggest Cities | Season 2TDC2022-08-12 | Four of the most amazing megacities around the world: Delhi, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Kinshasa.
This is the most populous city, and the capital, of a country that will soon have more people than anywhere else on Earth. Home to more than 31 million residents, it’s a chaotic place with a complicated history. It has major problems in housing, inequality, and transportation. But if it can solve them, its residents will experience an enormous increase in prosperity. As India’s seat of power, what happens here impacts a billion people and reverberates around the world. This is Delhi: a fulcrum of the 21st century.
The only megacity in the western United States has an ideal climate and a history of development based - uniquely - on vehicle mobility. There is no place quite like it on Earth. A powerful trendsetter, this diverse, beautiful city is one of the most recognizable on the planet. Arguably the most influential and successful urban area of the 1900s, its population grew from 100,000 to more than 15 million in just over a century. But this amazing boom favored some much more than others and has required a re-engineering of the natural environment on a scale previously unseen in human history. This is Los Angeles, California’s megacity.
Shanghai, the most populous city in the People’s Republic of China, rises on the low-lying swamplands where the tributaries and lakes of the Yangtze River Delta meet the East China Sea, and the vast Pacific Ocean beyond.
London england megacity london england uk united kingdom delhi jakarta indonesia jakarta megacity world cup qatar tdc argentina germany france messi ronaldo benzema neymar brazil spain netherlands arsenal chelsea manchester city moscow china japan united states new york los angeles tdc thededicatedcitizen mumbai tehran iran cairo tokyo beijing los angeles chicago la houston
Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, recently became the most populous in sub-Saharan Africa. It has some of the most bountiful and sought-after natural resources on the planet, many of which remain untapped by its enterprising and industrious workforce. Yet, despite being faced with some of the most challenging conditions in the history of civilization, it remains a land of enormous potential.
Chapters: 0:00 Welcome to Season 2 0:17 Delhi, India 17:55 Los Angeles, USA 40:00 Shanghai, China 53:04 Kinshasa, DR Congo
Gandhi, Dutch, History, Educational, UK, British, Spain, Italy, France, French, China, Germany, Europe, EU, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Netherlands, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Moscow, Japan, Tokyo, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, New YorkKinshasa, DRC: Africas Largest MEGACITYTDC2022-08-01 | Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo became the largest city in Africa in 2022, just beating out Lagos, Nigeria. Sources: Congo a river journey youtu.be/6t0k-hcffZw Super rich in Central Africa youtu.be/KaPLylJk89w Inside the murky business of cobalt mining in DR Congo youtu.be/ll7aUgeK3-o Chinese company removed as cobalt mine operator https://nyti.ms/3vxSvWN DR Congo worker abuse youtube.com/watch?v=KzZcbCn8l10 Deadliest journeys Congo: The Last Train in Katanga youtu.be/FVGQJM2MVNY DRCs corruption score bit.ly/3PUPeZQ 90-page Corruption report: bit.ly/3vrLtmg
Chapters: 0:00 Welcome to Kinshasa 0:52 Geography and natural resources 1:56 The colonialists arrive 2:48 An independent (corrupt) DRC 3:48 Cobalt mining capital of the world 4:30 China's plunder 6:51 Kinshasa's poor infrastructure and services 7:39 Rich (few) vs Poor (many) 8:38 Bike merchant "traffickers" 9:52 A wild (slow) train ride 10:39 Looking ahead
lubumbashi Brazzaville mbuji-Mayi Henry Stanley Leopoldville Rwanda Rwandan DRC Belgian Belgium US USA United States America politician Mobutu Sese Seko government Congolese rebel militia President Joseph Kabila million population poverty failed state patrolled by thousands UN peacekeepers war-torn east city north west south dangerous US State Department travel President Felix Tshisekedi parliament Chinese xi jinping beijing tanzania Zambia central African republic sudan Goma uganda angola cameroon guinea congo river somalia Atlantic ocean closest capitals kananga south Africa johanasb lagos nigeria kenya cairo egypt giza dar es salaam khartoumMaking Modern Los Angeles | Californias MEGACITYTDC2022-07-25 | Los Angeles, California is the only megacity in the western US. This is the story of its transformation from a tiny settlement into a city of 15 million.
Chapters: 0:00 Welcome to LA 1:06 Founding 'El Pueblo' 1:51 California becomes a US state 2:55 Growth into a city 4:09 LA Aqueduct 4:50 Absorbing other cities and towns 5:52 Hearing from an 1880's LA resident 6:10 Streetcars takeover 7:10 World's largest streetcar network 7:59 Automobiles takeover 8:10 FHA sparks a housing boom 9:46 Suburban sprawl 10:59 Cold War 'Defensive Dispersal' 12:00 Discriminatory housing practices 13:14 Freeways introduced 13:39 How freeways destroyed communities 14:06 State Water Project (feat. JFK) 15:30 A dominant city 16:26 LA's challenges 16:35 Boosting density around mass transit 17:07 High cost of living 17:42 Accessory Dwelling Units 18:12 Droughts and wildfires 18:34 The potential of water recovery 20:32 The coming 'Big One' earthquake 21:24 Goodnight and Goodluck
Script: Of all the cities on earth, the pace of civilizational transformation is most evident here. With over 25,000 buildings standing 12 stories or more, it has more high rises than anywhere else and is the most important economic engine in China. But there are real challenges on the horizon for this city of 25 million: some that took a pandemic to fully emerge, and others that grow more frightening with each passing year.
This is Shanghai, a bellwether of the 21st century.
The most populous city in the People’s Republic of China rises on the low-lying swamplands where the tributaries and lakes of the Yangtze River Delta meet the East China Sea, and the vast Pacific Ocean beyond.
Founded in the tenth century, its easy access to the extensive Asian interior made it an ideal location for those seeking to trade regionally and - eventually - with the empires of the West. In the 1800s, after a prolonged struggle with imperialists who used subterfuge and sabotage - like hooking millions, China was forced to allow foreigners greater access to its markets–and control over much of Shanghai. The city became a foothold for the British, French, Americans, and Japanese, who took possession of designated areas in the city, called “concessions,” where they established businesses that extracted great resources and wealth. Many Chinese call this the “century of humiliation.” Shanghai was essentially split into a “Chinese” half and a more modern European-styled “Western” half home to around 35,000 foreigners. Despite this dysfunction, the combined area thrived and by the mid-1930s it was one of the largest cities in the world with three million inhabitants.
Shanghai is where the second world truly began, as Japan unleashed Blitzkrieg. The combination of siege warfare and aerial bombardment, followed by attacks and house-to-house fighting, produced the horrific scenes now associated with Europe, but was first reported in China’s megacity.
Despite this nightmare, a glimmer of humanity still flickered in Shanghai, as evidenced by its unconditional welcoming of any Jews fleeing.
The war’s aftermath brought the Communists to power. This forced many foreign businesses to move south to independent Hong Kong. Despite this drain on capital and talent, the economic heart of the People’s Republic of China remained in Shanghai, and for the next four decades, this vital port city provided 70% of all the tax revenue that was collected and spent nationwide by China’s central party, whose bureaucrats were ensconced in Beijing–1,100 km away.
This was an untenable burden on the Shanghainese, and in 1991 two of their local leaders seized a rare opportunity to change things. After the crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, China’s Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping wanted new management in Beijing. The reins of power were turned over to two former mayors of Shanghai: Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Xiaoping as paramount leader, and Zhu Rongji, who became Vice Premier. They declared that Shanghai would be the “dragon’s head” of China’s modernization.
This is a birdseye look at Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine as its residents prepare for terrifying urban combat with an invading Russian army that is coming to take their freedom.
Home to nearly 3 million people, Kyiv is situated on the west bank of the Dnipro (nee-prow) river. To the north, the Dnipro is dammed by the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station, the site of a fierce battle at the start of the invasion when it was captured by Russian troops, then retaken by Ukraine. It is the main source of the city’s electricity and holds back the water in the Kyiv reservoir. If the dam were to fail, flooding could destroy the city’s low-lying riverside neighborhoods and plunge the rest of the capital into darkness.
The bridges crossing the Dnipro serve as a pinch point for Russian ground forces invading from the east. The advances of their armored vehicles have been repeatedly stymied throughout the country when farmland turns into more densely populated suburbs, funneling Russian vehicles into single-file lines that can be ambushed by highly effective shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons, and then pounded by Ukrainian artillery firing from several kilometers away.
So the handful of bridges crossing the Dnipro will be a major focal point in the days ahead.
The east flank of central Kyiv has another defensive advantage as well – its position on a hill that’s up to 100 meters above the river bank.
Kyiv is also facing Russians invading from Belarus in the northwest. Heavy fighting has reached Irpin, which lies across the river of the same name. Bridges crossing the narrow Irpin into Kyiv are more spread out than those crossing the Dnipro and lead to several roads that pass through an unpopulated, wooded area spanning a few kilometers before reaching the edge of the city.
Just to the north of Irpin is Antonov International Airport. In one of the opening moves of the war, it was briefly captured by Russian paramilitary troops flown in by helicopter. But the airport was quickly retaken by the Ukrainians.
Control of airfields is vital. There are four others in the immediate region: the Vasylkiv Air force base to the south, which was reported destroyed in a Russian missile attack on March 15, the Boryspil airport - attacked on the first day of the war - the Sviatoshyn industrial airfield, and Sikorsky International airport located 7 kilometers south of the city center.
For the current columns of Russian ground forces to reach the city center, they will have to fight their way through several kilometers of a highly built-up and developed European capital. Combat would take place over hundreds of blocks among both wide boulevards and narrow streets lined by 4-10 story buildings. We have not seen anything like this since World War II.
Based on how the war has gone so far, it is hard to imagine how Russia will effectively occupy and maintain control of a city this size in the face of what has been a fierce and persistent resistance.
But if the occupation is Putin’s goal, Russia will definitely need to control the Kyiv rail hub so resupplies can arrive by train. And - for symbolic purposes - it will need to control independence square and the government buildings around it.
However, if the goal is to encircle and lay siege to the city to starve and break its people, as the Russians are doing to other Ukrainian cities, the occupier's lines will likely have to hold up against many desperate attempts to break them from both inside and outside.
Whatever happens in Kyiv, the entire world is watching.Delhi, Indias MEGACITY: Capital of a Billion PeopleTDC2022-03-03 | India's capital and most populous city is Delhi, home to 31 million residents. Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
This is the most populous city, and the capital, of a country that will soon have more people than anywhere else on Earth. Home to more than 31 million residents, it’s a chaotic place with a complicated history. It has major problems in housing, inequality, and transportation, but if it can solve them, its residents will experience an enormous increase in prosperity. As India’s seat of power, what happens here impacts a billion people and reverberates around the world. This is Delhi: a fulcrum of the 21st century.
Nestled along a protective ridge that sends Himalayan snowmelt either west to the tributaries of the Indus river, or east to the Ganges, Delhi is the gateway to one of the most expansive, fertile agricultural plains on the planet, and a collection point for goods on their way to an extensive coastline for export.
This land has been the capital of empire after empire for thousands of years, but the defining moment in its modern history occurred 75 years ago when India declared its independence from the British Empire at Delhi’s Red Fort. This resulted in the partition of the Indian territory along religious lines into India, and West and East Pakistan, which eventually became independent Bangladesh.
This had massive consequences.
This flood of new arrivals overwhelmed the city as makeshift housing settlements sprouted and grew all over. This building wasn’t done to code and lacked basic plumbing and sewers. It’s a crisis that Delhi is still struggling to solve. Today, the percentage of its residents living in so-called unauthorized areas is as high as 40%. That’s a staggering 12 million people.
But to get a more complete picture of what Delhi is today, we must go back to events after Indian independence. In 1947 Indian per-capita income had not increased since 1757–that’s 190 years of British imperialists taking ownership of - and exporting away - vast quantities of India’s bountiful natural resources. Revolutionary Mahatma Gandhi and his hand-picked political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, knew the Indian people needed a far different system than what the British Empire had imposed.
What Nehru wanted was an idyllic ‘Total Society’ in which injustice and inequality would be defeated by the perfect nation-system. This dream was cemented during a short four-day visit to Moscow, where Nehru and his father were wined and dined by the Communist Party’s elite celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. With tightly managed visits to factories and theatres, it was an obvious attempt to impart a rosy picture of Soviet-style socialism onto visiting dignitaries, and it worked. Nehru was awed by the USSR’s achievements in industry, art, and bureaucracy.
Real estate and land development in the city of Delhi was tightly controlled. The Delhi Development Authority - or DDA - was created in 1957 and granted the exclusive responsibility of land development within the borders of the city. The DDA prevented individuals from owning more than a handful of acres and forced people to sell the agency their property at below-market prices.
G20 SummitWhats Bidens $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Law Do? A Lot.TDC2022-01-22 | President Joe Biden is overseeing the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. His administration negotiated with and received the historic opportunity from Congress in 2021, after just 10 months in office. Offset your own carbon footprint on Wren: wren.co/start/tdc The first 100 people who sign up will have 10 extra trees planted in their name!
The $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is the largest investment in America’s physical public assets in decades and the biggest commitment ever by the government of the USA to fight climate change. The bill expands the Buy America requirement for infrastructure materials, which will boost the American manufacturing sector and industries like steel production. Its core is an expansion of the 5-year transportation infrastructure law known as the FAST Act, passed in 2015. 45% of Americans lack access to public transportation and for every $1b spent on transit, 50,000 jobs are created. This bill will provide the largest investment in public transit in American history. Almost 40K people died in motor vehicle-related incidents in 2019, and unsafe road infrastructure is a major risk factor for these fatalities. On top of traditional infrastructure spending, the bill invests an unprecedented $550 billion over five years on dozens of innovative new programs. The bill builds out a national network of 500,000 electric car (EV) chargers to ease range anxiety and accelerate the switchover from gasoline to electric. $500m to electrifying school buses, $5b for zero-emission public transit buses, and $2.5b toward electrifying the many ferries on our extensive waterways. To make sure these vehicles are powered by renewable electricity, the bill makes the largest investment in the energy grid in American history. Hundreds of substations and thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines will bring green electricity to cities as wind and solar are now the lowest-cost sources of electricity. With 45,000 bridges in poor condition throughout the country, a new program will oversee $40b for repairs and rebuilds. The largest investment in Amtrak's history will modernize the passenger rail network for our transportation and economic future. Airport and port delays jeopardize over 1 million jobs. The bill will fund repairs, improve logistics, reduce congestion, and increase electrification to reduce emissions. More than 30 million Americans live in areas with no high-speed internet infrastructure and are still suffering seconds-long waits to load pages and constant video buffering–or they have to go to a library or restaurant just to get something done. This historic investment will guarantee that every American has reliable broadband internet access. 10 million households and 400,000 schools lack access to safe drinking water. The Biden administration detailed its plan to try to replace every underground drinking water pipe in the country in the next ten years. About half of the children in the US have detectable levels of lead in their blood. In 2021, 20 weather disasters of $1b each 688 people no alive. To build resilience to extreme weather, $71b on: Flood mitigation and waterway management by the Army Corps of Engineers; Water storage, recycling, and ecosystem restoration to help California and other western states deal with drought. Wildfire fighting like clearing dry brush and trees fuel blazes. Inside the $1.2 TRILLION Plan to Modernize US Infrastructure
Inflation reduction act Joe Biden Michelle Obama Brian Tyler CohenHow We Almost Stopped Climate Change 30 Years AgoTDC2021-11-29 | The government fully understood the climate crisis during the 1980s, 90s, and 00s, but was unable to put serious limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
How We Almost Stopped Climate Change 30 Years AgoSolving Climate Change with R&D and Civic ActionTDC2020-12-21 | Smart strategies like Research & Development and targeted Civic Action are very effective ways to stop Climate Change. Watch the full episode here: tdc.video/programs/the-best-policy-solutions-for-cutting-co2e-emissions
Video Transcript: [Plank] I hear you. Performing research and development efficiently will be essential for discovering solutions to the problems that still need to be solved. Luckily there are a number of successful practices for countries to adopt that will allow them to foster the innovation necessary to achieve rapid decarbonization of their economies. [Orvis] Being able to recruit good talent, having a program that fosters both domestic and international experts in stem sciences is really important. Public private partnerships. Those have been really successful in the US where a company may want to invest in a new technology, but it might be prohibitively expensive for them to build a research facility or a lab. The US government and other governments, for example in Germany they have the Fraunhofer Institute, may have really advanced tech labs where they can partner with research organizations or companies who are researching new technologies, to come in and be able to use those labs for a fee for example and leverage the government's resources into research and development. Another important one is a program like ARPA-E. This is a program the Department of Energy runs, but the idea is to help companies overcome some of the periods in which it can be very hard to get financing to develop projects. There's this thing known as the valley of in research and development where you go from taking a product from the lab to commercializing it. And that interim stage, it can be very hard to find financing. So the extent the government is able to help, through government-backed loans or through research programs like ARPA-E that can help get products that are delivering results in the lab, into the field so they can start to be commercialized. [Plank] Innovations are great, but for them to be implemented it often takes citizens educating their government representatives about the best way forward, and then staying engaged to make sure that path is followed. Hal Harvey - Robbie's boss at energy innovations and the lead author of this book - explained the importance of civic action during a Q&A after a recent talk. [Audience member] How does one go about applying political pressure? [Harvey] Applying political pressure? I'll just give an example, in California, before the public utilities commission, NRDC and a group called CERT are two of the most influential. You can call them up - they will answer the phone - and say I'd like to help. What can I do? And tell them what your skills are. And then they might say, 'I need a cost model for integrating solar with a grid, or I might need 50 people to come to the hearing,' right? There's a bunch of different ways to do it. We did this precision intervention with air quality laws and energy laws all the time. And we would get, like when there was a pollution law coming up, we would get a hundred mothers of asthmatic kids to come to that hearing. You win that venue, you win the vote. And that's what it should be. They're supposed to represent those asthmatic kids. They're not supposed to represent the owner of the coal-fired power plant--it's a public utilities commission. So that's what you do. You look at -- any good argument has ethos, logos, and pathos, so bring in one of those: do the analysis, bring in the kids, tell a story. Whatever it takes, but make sure you're an actor with intensity at that moment. Choose a venue, choose the moment, act with intensity. [Orvis] He's absolutely right. For example, in the power sector, there's something like five public utility commissioners in every state, give or take, but that's actually where the rubber meets the road, and that's where policy gets made. If we could leverage the great enthusiasm and drive that people have to go to these marches and to push for divestment into actually attending these meetings, we could have a much much bigger impact in terms of actually getting those those reductions. And so Hal likes to talk about, you know five PUC commissioners, 50 states, that's 250. But actually there's only coal in maybe 15 of those states, so you start cutting it down, you see, 'okay, if we influence 50 people we can push the power sector to essentially decarbonize.' Targeting those focus points is a great way to leverage everyone's drive and motivation into actually getting those reductions on the ground.Exploring Carbon Pricing MethodsTDC2020-12-17 | Cutting CO2e rapidly requires governments to price carbon. There are generally two ways to do that: a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, or the creation of a marketplace where emissions are capped and auctioned as credits allowing polluters to trade for the right to emit CO2e. Watch the full episode: tdc.video/programs/the-best-policy-solutions-for-cutting-co2e-emissions
Full Transcript: [Plank] Carbon pricing. Where have we seen the most successful implementation of a carbon price? [Orvis] The cap-and-trade program in California is probably the most successful carbon pricing program in the world. There are a couple different kinds of carbon pricing: there's cap and trade, and then there's a carbon tax where the tax just specifies a certain price, and cap and trade actually specifies the amount, and then the price is kind of discovered through the market. California actually has a hybrid system. They have a cap-and-trade system, but if for some reason it becomes very costly, California has a floor price which then converts the cap into essentially a tax--because even though it might be cheaper than that it just says, 'okay this is the floor price and it's not going below that.' Or what's happened more frequently is the emissions reductions have actually been much cheaper than advertised, and in other regions this has caused the price of the market to basically bottom out at zero. So that type of system is really effective for containing the cost of a carbon pricing program while also ensuring - within the reasonable range of costs - that emissions are capped at a target level. The program in California has also been linked with other regions. That provides, again, that idea of flexibility for compliance and helps lower the cost across all those regions. It's been really successful, and it's been one of the only programs that hasn't experienced, to put it bluntly, a comically low floor price. The emissions trading scheme in the European Union - which is now trending towards increasing because the EU recently passed a set of reforms that significantly strengthened it - but for years it sat close to zero and effectively drove no abatement. I think we've had a wave of pretty unsuccessful carbon pricing programs globally, but policymakers have learned a lot of lessons from those programs and are now strengthening them. China's in the process of rolling out its own emissions trading scheme. The details are still a bit up in the air on that, but it will be great to see the world's largest emitter start implementing this program. [Plank] Maybe this comes along with the carbon tax - but that we need to start thinking about putting a tax on beef. Has anybody been looking at that? [Orvis] It's a tough one. Taxing beef is an option, but one thing we focus on - and one of the reasons it's not prominently featured in the book - is we look at just not just the potential to reduce emissions, but also the difficulty or the feasibility of achieving those reductions through policy. So if you only have to target 50 utility companies or even 500 regulators, that's a lot easier than having to go manage 300 million people's dietary habits. Yes, agriculture is a significant source of emissions - not just in the US but in other countries - but especially in the US where we have very high meat consumption per capita, in particular beef and dairy are the biggest drivers of agricultural emissions. And taxing it may be challenging, both in terms of getting the outcomes we want, but also politically very challenging. [Plank] Yeah, we talked about how they pushed back on the EVs in Georgia, imagine if we start taxing people's burgers and cheese, right? [Orvis] Even the concept of it has already generated lots of feedback that has been all over different news media outlets. So it's hard to foresee a situation in which that really takes off. [Plank] I hear you. The full-length, hourlong version of this interview is available to members of my new Video-On-Demand offering, TDC.video If you found this interesting, you should definitely check that out. A premium membership not only gets you access to every full-length episode of the Climate Change Solutions show, you help support this project, and its goal of bringing these solutions to the attention of as many people as possible. Plus you get access to my research links from each episode of this show to help you efficiently dig much deeper into these solutions on your own. Until next time, for TDC, I'm Bryce Plank. Thanks for watching.How to De-Carbonize Methane, Cement, & IndustryTDC2020-12-14 | How to cut emissions from the Industrial, Methane "Natural Gas," and Cement manufacturing sectors. Watch the full episode: tdc.video/programs/the-best-policy-solutions-for-cutting-co2e-emissions
[Plank] Industrial processes - as I pointed out in my video on the top 20 emitters -making things like chemicals, materials, steel, and especially cement, will be one of the hardest areas of the global economy to decarbonize. I was struck by the figure that up to 50 percent of the energy used in industry is lost as heat. [Orvis] Waste heat recovery is broadly the category referred to to try and capture that energy. But in industry there's generally energy that's used to create heat - often steam - for industrial processes, and then energy that's used to create electricity. China has one of the most successful programs in the world to address energy and emissions in industry. It's called the Top Ten Thousand Program and it's really a bucket of several different policies ranging from things like worker training, to energy audits and energy reporting. It's amazing when you require people to report how much energy they're using and where it's coming from, you help industries identify processes where they're using much more than they should. [Plank] So as the United States has turned to natural gas instead of coal, methane leaks are a huge problem. How are policymakers tackling this specific challenge? [Orvis] There are different standards in different states. The Obama administration had a set of natural gas standards that have since been scrapped by the Trump administration. But monitoring is a big part of the issue. There's lots of miles of pipeline and it's challenging, and can be expensive, for natural gas operators to monitor all of that. But without monitoring, we don't really - it's very hard - to know the leakage rate and where the leakage is occurring if we don't have a better understanding of the system, and being able to identify those leaks. So at a minimum we need better monitoring of the pipeline system, and that covers the entire system all the way from where the gas is extracted, down to where it goes into people's homes. [Plank] Cement is a massive emitter. The whole process is very emission, energy intensive. Are there policies that have achieved decarbonizing cement even a little bit? I think a little bit would go a long way given how much it's used. [Orvis] A big one is something called cement clinker substitution, which basically means--the cement process involves breaking down some inputs into material that can then be used as cement. But you can replace some of that from other sources such as ash or gypsum, not that we want to promote the use of coal, but coal ash is often used as an input to cement manufacturing as a substitute. So there are a fair amount of substitute materials that you can use. Now you can't fully replace what's in cement, and there are trade-offs between substituting in those materials and other properties of cement, but provided it meets certain criteria, you can increase the share of cement that's coming from those materials and therefore avoid the process - the chemical process - by which you have to make the clinker. I think some industries are looking at alternatives for the energy used to create the cement. So exploring whether or not they can use indirect heat from electricity would be a big one, reducing the demand for cement actually is another big one. So buildings in the US last 50, 80, 100 years. Buildings on average in China last 20 years. And so every 20 years that building has to be replaced with new cement. And that's from a mixture of building codes, sometimes the quality of the materials - the steel or the cement - used is not high quality, and that causes the building to kind of crumble. In the long run cement is actually a good industry to target for carbon capture because that process of turning the inputs into clinker that's used for cement, that actually produces CO2 as a pretty pure by-product and so if you can just capture that in storage, you don't have to deal as much with separating it, which is one of the big costs of carbon capture. My hope is that in the long run that might be a good - cement might be a good - candidate for carbon capture. There's an emerging group of people who think that something called cross-laminated timber, which is a new way of reforming wood products that makes them have almost the same strength as cement, that that's a hopeful potential avenue, but it's it's still emerging and it's not clear yet how large of the market for buildings can be met by that.How Clever Urban Design & Transit Cut CO2 EmissionsTDC2020-12-10 | How to intelligently design and build cities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Watch the full episode: tdc.video/programs/the-best-policy-solutions-for-cutting-co2e-emissions
Exploring the most successful policies around the world for solving Climate Change by targeting and cutting CO2e emissions. With Robbie Orvis, author of Designing Climate Solutions: A policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy. Orvis is Director of Energy Policy Design at Energy Innovations.How Governments Encourage Renewable Energy and Electric VehiclesTDC2020-12-04 | The most effective policies for cutting emissions from the electricity and transportation sectors, the two largest sources of CO2e. Watch the full episode: tdc.video/programs/the-best-policy-solutions-for-cutting-co2e-emissions
Exploring the most successful policies around the world for solving Climate Change by targeting and cutting CO2e emissions. With Robbie Orvis, author of Designing Climate Solutions: A policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy. Orvis is Director of Energy Policy Design at Energy Innovations.
Fifty percent of all greenhouse gasses come from just seven countries. This is a presentation of the best policies for cutting those emissions and stopping global warming.
In the first episode of this series we learned who the biggest emitters are. In the second, Dr. Francis taught us how those emissions are warming the planet and disrupting the global climate systems.
In this video we’ll explore the most successful policies for targeting and cutting emissions that are in place around the world. And who better to guide us than the person who wrote the book on the subject, Robbie Orvis. [Director of Energy Policy Design, Energy Innovations]
Designing Climate Solutions is an accessible tool for examining all the good work being done to tackle climate change. In it, Orvis and his team analyzed every type of emissions reduction policy around the world to figure out which are most effective. Their premise is simple: to solve this crisis we need to learn from each other what works best as quickly as possible. It was a huge inspiration and help for me in putting this series together so it’s great to be able to hear from Robbie directly.
Generating electricity through the combustion of coal and methane natural gas is currently responsible for the most emissions around the world. There are two main policies to encourage utilities to invest in wind and solar energy production: feed-in tariffs and renewable energy tax credits.
And where we’re going is to an electrify everything strategy to take advantage of all the renewable electricity we’ll soon be generating. The main fossil fuel consumer in the United States is now the transportation sector. So far, the primary tool for governments to lower gasoline consumption, cut emissions, and increase investment in new technologies, like electric vehicles, has been a vehicle performance standard. This sets a minimum limit on the miles per gallon a manufacturer’s entire fleet of vehicles must average.Category 6 Hurricanes? How Extreme Jet Streams Are Wreaking HavocTDC2020-11-26 | Disrupted jet streams have made weather worldwide more extreme. Watch the full conversation: tdc.video/programs/how-earths-climate-system-is-changing
Warming Arctic air is disrupting the jet stream, causing more extreme weather: heatwaves, droughts, tornados, category 6 hurricanes, rainfall events, floods, wildfires, snowstorms, blizzards.
Full transcript: (Bryce) The region experiencing the fastest warming is the Arctic. At the same time, areas like the Eastern United States have been experiencing colder than normal temperatures at times during the winter. This seemingly strange phenomenon is happening because warming arctic air is causing the jet stream, that regulates weather here in North America, to behave in more extreme ways. (Dr. Francis) Because of the effect of the rapid arctic warming on the jet stream, the jet stream being this river of wind that encircles the northern hemisphere. It takes these north-south swings as it as it goes around the northern hemisphere. And one of the ways the rapid arctic warming is affecting the jet stream is to make those big north south swings be big more often. And when we have one of those big southward dips in the jet stream during the winter it allows the cold air from the arctic to penetrate farther south. And we see this happening more frequently over the Eastern U.S. and over Eastern Asia in connection with this rapidly warming arctic. When that temperature difference is really strong then that's when we see very strong jet streams. And when it's weaker, like when the arctic warms much faster than the areas farther south, then we tend to see the jet stream weaken and when it's weaker it tends to want to take these bigger north-south swings. They tend to get stuck in place for days and sometimes even weeks. Whatever weather you're experiencing relative to your position in that wave, you tend to have those same weather conditions for a long time. (Bryce) The jet stream is also slowing down in the summertime causing three consecutive years of unprecedented hurricanes: 2017's Harvey, 2018's Florence, and 2019's Dorian. Each storm got "stuck" and dumped record rainfall on Houston, the Carolinas, and the Bahamas. (Dr. Francis) The slow movement of Dorian was more related to the fact that in summer time we're seeing the jet stream weaken over the continents pretty dramatically. And the jet stream winds create the highs and the lows that steer hurricanes. In that particular case, there was a very weak high pressure area sitting off Cape Hatteras for several days and it sort of blocked it from heading north. And then that high pressure weakened and it allowed Dorian to finally start moving northward. So the paths of hurricanes depend completely on what the jet stream is doing. And when those winds in the atmosphere are very weak, it makes it very hard to forecast where a hurricane's going to go. (Bryce) And a couple years before that Harvey just dumping. (Dr. Francis) Yep. (Bryce) Feet of- (Dr. Francis) Yep, just a year before. (Bryce) Just sitting over Houston. So is that what we have to look forward to? (Dr. Francis) I think we need to look forward to having it happen more often for sure. And there's been a couple recent papers that have actually documented this trend. So it does appear that hurricanes are tending to be slower. And so the tendency for these storms to just sit in one place for a while is increasing, and it makes lots of sense--it all fits the story. (Bryce) Is there a hurricane beyond a category five that we could see? (Dr. Francis) Yeah, there's some discussion of creating a cat six. (Bryce) Wow. Dr. Francis) Yep there is talk of that. Going back to that water vapor I was talking about. So when the ocean temperatures are really warm there's also a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere and that's the main fuel to generate a hurricane. There's a lot of other factors, but the main one that you need for a hurricane to form, and to become strong, is that very warm water and a lot of moisture in the atmosphere.
My full, wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Francis is available to watch now, ad-free, through the link below on my new premium site. Membership gets you full early access to every episode of the Climate Change Solutions show and allows me to continue making them in these uncertain times. The small fee also unlocks links to all the research I do for each episode, so you can easily venture down some of the many rabbit holes I've been exploring. Thanks for watching. For TDC, I'm Bryce PlankHow More Water Vapor is Causing Extreme WeatherTDC2020-11-22 | Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas: more of it = more extreme weather. Watch the full conversation: tdc.video/programs/how-earths-climate-system-is-changing
One of the strongest connections between climate change and extreme weather events like record storms, wildfires, droughts, floods, and heatwaves is water vapor, the most abundant greenhouse gas.Weve Disrupted the All-Important ‘Ocean Conveyor Belt’TDC2020-11-19 | Experts are terrified this climate 'tipping element' could devastate humanity. Watch the full conversation: tdc.video/programs/how-earths-climate-system-is-changing
Full Transcript: (Bryce) Global weather patterns are regulated by ocean currents, but warming water is causing
those currents to change.
This is one of a handful of earth system tipping elements that climate experts fear could set
off incomprehensible devastation.
(Dr. Francis) I'm sure most people have heard about the ocean conveyor belt which is basically
the system of ocean currents that flow all around the world's oceans.
There are two places really that that push that current to flow.
One of them is in the North Atlantic.
And the idea here is that when fall and winter come along the ocean surface waters get cold
and they freeze.
And when they freeze, they eject the salt out of the water.
And that heavy, salty, cold water that comes out of that freezing process is very heavy
relative to the other water in the area, and so it sinks really rapidly.
And it creates this downward flow of water which then basically turns south and starts
heading towards the southern Atlantic and meets up with other currents along the way.
And another area where this happens is off the coast of Antarctica, where also you get
some very cold air temperatures and ocean water freezing.
So the concern is that in the area around Greenland, the water has been becoming fresher
partly because of the water that's being melted from the Greenland ice sheet.
(Medley) "Over the past few days we've seen a significant amount of, actually, liquid
water on the surface that have both accumulated in small ponds, and probably approaching the
size of lakes especially near the edge of the ice sheet.
An interesting thing is that the melt season actually in Greenland started pretty much
end of April, beginning of May--which, in the grand scheme of things, is very close
to a month earlier than average.
My name is Brooke Medley.
I'm the deputy project scientist for Operation Ice Bridge.
Last April and May, we were actually flying in Greenland out of Kangerlussuaq on the NASA
P-3.
This was somewhat of a unique year where we expected to be going early enough where we
would see the typical dry snow conditions.
But, rather, we were met with a much different scenario where we saw all these spectacular
blue ponds of beautiful liquid water just pooling on top of the surface.
The ice sheet is actually experiencing almost an additional month of melt because it started
so early here.
Part of it is actually driven by the fact that it's very warm right now, but also that
there was not a lot of snowfall last winter.
And so what that means is when the snow does melt it very quickly exposes darker ice, which
can then melt even faster.
Just a significant increase in the total amount of water that we just see in general over
the course of 2019.
There was so much melt that it actually ended up being the second largest meltwater production
year for the Greenland ice sheet since 1980.
It's actually quite simple: the longer your melt season that means you can just have more
time to accumulate more melt, and the only place for this water to go is into the oceans."
(Dr. Francis) Also, there's more fresh water flowing from rivers into the Arctic ocean.
That fresher water then comes out into the North Atlantic in that passage between Europe
and Greenland there.
And so we're finding this area of fresher than normal water just south of Greenland
and the reason it's looking colder than average there is because when that fresh water is
sitting there it floats because fresh water is lighter than the salt water.
It sits on top and it prevents that freezing process and that creation of that very salty,
dense water from happening, it slows it down anyway.
(Bryce) You can see that on the map--that's the most contrasting, rapidly contrasting
color area.
(Dr. Francis) Exactly.
(Bryce) It's very clear.
(Dr. Francis) Yes it is.
And it even has a name.
It's called the 'Cold Blob.'
(Bryce) The cold blob?
(Dr. Francis) Yes, it's a very technical term.
(Bryce) Because it just sits.
(Dr. Francis) Yeah, it's been there for several years and it's a very interesting area.
A lot of people are studying it because not only does it have this effect on the ocean
circulation, but it also is causing weather patterns to change in the North Atlantic and
in Europe.
Because whenever you change temperature patterns in the ocean or on land you affect winds.
And when you affect winds, you affect weather.Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback LoopTDC2020-11-16 | The oceans absorb 90% of the heat from greenhouse gasses, causing evermore ice to melt. Watch the full conversation: tdc.video/programs/how-earths-climate-system-is-changing
Subscribe to TDC on YouTube:
youtube.com/TheDailyConversationGlobal CO2 Emissions: A Country-By-Country BreakdownTDC2020-10-31 | The most polluting (CO2 emitting) economic sectors by Geo-Sector (country-level economic sectors). Become a member to access the extended episode: tdc.video
This is Episode 1 of Climate Change Solutions, a new TDC original series.
If reaching net-zero is the struggle of our lifetimes, then we need to systematically look at how we're going to get that done and share the best solutions with as many citizens and decision makers as possible. Luckily, there are many brilliant people out there dedicating their lives to solving this problem. This series will show you some of their work.
Whether you watch on YouTube - or become a member at TDC.video - your support sustains this show.
-BryceIntroducing Climate Change SolutionsTDC2020-10-31 | A new series exploring the tools, techniques, and policies to achieve net-zero CO2e emissions and prevent the worst effects of climate change. Start watching full episodes now: tdc.video
Reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions is the struggle of our lifetimes, so it is time for us to systematically look at how to do that, and share the best solutions with as many citizens and decision makers as possible. Luckily, there are many brilliant people dedicating their lives to solving this problem. This series will bring you some of their stories--their work.
Whether you watch on YT, or become a member, your support will help sustain this show.
-BryceMEGACITIES of the World (Season 1 - Complete)TDC2019-01-25 | Seven of the most amazing megacities around the world. Try Dashlane Premium free for 30 days here: dashlane.com/tdc Use the coupon code TDC to get 10% off Dashlane Premium.
Megacities in this video include Tokyo, Japan; São Paulo, Brazil; Cairo, Egypt; Mexico City, Mexico; New York, USA; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Paris, France.
CAIRO: Editing help from Robin West Music: Matt Stewart Evans: soundcloud.com/mattstewartevans/tracks YouTube audio library Motion Array Full piece by NPR's Jane Arraf: http://n.pr/2wFQGXA
0:00 Start 0:22 Tokyo, Japan 12:08 São Paulo, Brazil 22:55 Cairo, Egypt 32:14 Mexico City, Mexico 40:43 New York City, United States of America 53:50 Dhaka, Bangladesh 1:00:49 Paris, FranceSão Paulo, Brazils MEGACITY: Largest City in the AmericasTDC2018-09-13 | São Paulo, Brazil is the largest metropolis in the Americas and the economic engine of the world’s sixth most-populous country.
The dramatic cliffs and endless beaches of Rio De Janeiro makes it the city that probably first comes to mind when you think of Brazil. But São Paulo, the largest metropolis in the southern hemisphere, is the true economic engine of the world’s sixth most-populous country.
In 1554, Catholic missionaries - with the help of indigenous workers - built a small village perched 750 meters above sea level and 70 kilometers from the Atlantic coast. It was the only inland settlement in the country, a jumping off point for expeditions of conquerors, traders, and gold hunters.
In the 1800’s, Brazil became the world’s leading coffee producer, but the farmers in Rio over-cultivated their soil, giving São Paulo an opening to become the country’s agricultural hub. As one of the few inland towns, it was closer than Rio to the plantations spread throughout the interior, and it was directly linked by rail to the port of Santos, making it the ideal junction for shipments of goods on their way to the coast for export.
In 1888, Brazil’s businesses adapted to another significant change when Emperor Dom Pedro II - regarded by many as the greatest Brazilian to ever live - convinced his people to abolish slavery. With their captive labor force suddenly free, farmers and industrialists turned to immigrants from abroad. Today, as a result, São Paulo has the largest population of Italian descendants of any city on the planet, including Rome; the largest Japanese community outside of Japan; and - of course - significant numbers of Portuguese and Spanish.
Many of these newcomers were skilled factory workers whose knowledge helped São Paulo emerge as a manufacturing capital during the industrial revolution and WWII.
Over a period of less than 30 years, the city’s population exploded from 250,000 to 1 million. Steady growth continued through the century, passing Rio in 1960, and hitting 8.5 million in 1980.
Today, the population of the megalopolis known as “Sampa” is over 20 million. In many ways it is a thriving global city with the largest stock exchange in Latin America; a vibrant culture with over 100 museums and dynamic performing arts spaces and beautiful parks. As part of futbol-crazed Brazil, it proudly hosted matches during the 2014 World Cup; and is making significant investments in the next generation, with 850,000 students enrolled in higher education courses.
Unfortunately though, São Paulo’s rapid development has also taken a heavy toll, with four core problems rising above the rest.
The city’s only major bodies of water are the Tiete and Pinheiros rivers. As the population grew, the government - plagued by inefficiency and corruption - struggled to meet demand for basic infrastructure. Without enough wastewater treatment plants, sewage from millions of people flowed directly into the rivers. Toxic waste from industrial facilities was dumped without limit. When new highways were built, the city laid them on the only continuous stretches of land left, the riverbanks, and then hid stretches of them behind walls. But even if you can’t always see the rivers, their stench doesn’t go away.
When the Tiete is at it most-choked, it is a biologically deadzone as far as Barra Bonita, 260 km downstream.
It wasn’t always this way. The rivers used to be gathering points for recreation--distant memories that are motivating current rehabilitation efforts, which include projects to treat 100% of all wastewater before it enters the Tiete, putting an end to all dumping, and teaching people how to care for their rivers and streams.
peru obama noticias trump news al jazeeraParis, Frances MEGACITY: Europes Largest CityTDC2018-07-15 | Paris, France is the grand megacity of Europe at the forefront of human progress.
Script: One MegaCity always seems to be at the forefront of progressive movements. Whether it’s innovation in its cuisine, couture, infrastructure, or governance, this refuge for the rebel, artist, philosopher, and scientist, has always held a place in the hearts of romantics and vanguards alike. Because here, in The City of Light, engineers and artists often share a line of sight. This is Paris, the Grand MegaCity.
Twenty-three hundred years ago, a group of Celtic Gauls called the Parisii settled on the Île de la Cité, a small island in the middle of the Seine. After falling into the hands of the Roman Empire, the town grew, until the Empire collapsed a short time later. Clovis, the first king to unite all the Frankish tribes is the origin of the name Louis, taken by 18 subsequent French monarchs.
For the next thousand years, or the period known as the Middle Ages, Paris saw rulers, religions, wars, and plagues come and go as it became the largest city in Europe. Home to one of the first Universities and the birthplace of Gothic architecture, Paris was ground zero for the enlightenment. Philosophies embracing individual liberty, religious tolerance, and the scientific method, were perfectly captured by the phrase Sapere aude, “dare to know.”
In the end, the monarchy and the Church were simply overmatched by the sheer power of a set of ideas whose time had come--ideas that were spread far and wide by books and pamphlets.
The stage was set for Revolution.
On the afternoon of July 14, 1789, the Bastille, a medieval fortress and prison symbolizing royal authority in the center of Paris, was overtaken by force. It was the opening move in a ten year struggle that featured the overthrow of the monarchy, the establishment of the French Republic, and political turmoil. The dictatorship of Napoleon followed, delivering many principles of the revolution to much of Western Europe.
By the middle of the 1800’s, Paris had well over a million people, but was made up of tight streets and overpopulated, filthy alleyways. Life for many was a miserable, day-to-day struggle in disease-ridden slums. So Napoleon’s nephew, who had become emperor himself, set out to make the city healthier, less congested, and grander.
He turned to a clever man described as big, strong, energetic, and full of audacity and skill: the visionary urban planner Baron Haussmann. He imagined the modern city as a living organism with the boulevards its arteries.
Over the next 17 years, the duo oversaw the most epic public works spree since Ancient Rome. Tens of thousands of workers were hired to carry out their plans, which included a new aqueduct and massive reservoir to bring clean water from the Vanne River, and hundreds of kilometers of pipes to distribute it throughout the city; completely rebuilding the sewer system and installing hundreds of kilometers of pipes inside of it to distribute gas for thousands of new streetlights; two brand new rail stations connecting Paris to the rest of France; and more than twenty parks to ensure that none was more than a ten minute’s walk away. Four of these ‘lawns of Paris’ were major parks, inspired by Hyde Park in London which Napoleon remembered fondly from his time in exile.
But the innovation that most transformed the city was Haussmann's dedication to wide boulevards, twelve of which converge on the roundabout circling the Arc De Triomphe. Throughout the thirty year undertaking, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in phases as the entire city became a construction zone. This sacrifice - which wasn’t always appreciated by the residents of Paris - was well worth the end result. The discipline to keep the buildings lining these avenues the same height, all faced with similar colored stone, created a striking visual effect.
Over the next 100 years, Paris was thankfully spared the widespread destruction suffered by many other capitals in the wars and conflicts that unfolded across Europe. When the unthinkable happened in 1940, and flags were raised throughout Paris during the German occupation, the city was declared too beautiful to destroy.
Famous photos show him posing like a tourist at the base of the Eiffel tower, which was the tallest building in the world at the time of its construction in 1889. Originally planned to be dismantled after 20 years, converting it into a radio tower saved it and today it is the most visited landmark on the planet.Earth’s Model MEGACITY: Tokyo, JapanTDC2018-07-03 | Tokyo is the most successful metropolis in the history of the world with 39 million residents, 50% more people than any other urban area. It is the safest big city on the planet and has a two trillion dollar GDP--an economy larger than all but eight entire countries. More MEGACITIES: bit.ly/2NozRJl Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thedailyconversation Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thedailyconvo Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Script: Our story begins 561 years ago when a samurai warrior built a castle on the shore of a fishing village called Edo. Its rich soil was ideal for growing rice and attracted farmers from far and wide.
In 1600, the great commander Tokugawa Ieyasu won the Battle of Sekigahara, a pivotal moment in history that secured Edo’s status as the most important place in Japan.
Unfortunately, the buildings of the expanding city were made of wood and paper, a dangerous combination to confront the warm winds of summer. Legend has it that on one particularly dry afternoon in 1657, a priest made the deadly mistake of burning an unlucky kimono. The fire flared up, ignited his temple, and engulfed 70% of the city. 100,000 people lost their lives.
Despite the disaster, by the middle of the 19th century Edo’s population was in the millions. That’s when the military shogunate system that had ruled for almost 700 years ended. A new government led by a young emperor finally made Edo the official capital of Japan, renamed it Tokyo.
Today, a century of conservation has resulted in parks covering 20% of the land in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
When he was six years old, Irving Hernandez De La Torre arrived in the United States. In May, seventeen years later, he graduated with an engineering degree from San Diego State University. Now, he and his entire family face deportation after Donald Trump's administration ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was implemented by President Obama in 2012.
How was your 2017 eclipse experience?Worlds 10 Most Generous CountriesTDC2017-08-26 | The top ten countries on the World Giving Index, determined by a worldwide poll of three factors: helping a stranger, donating money, and volunteering. A study by the Charities Aid Foundation: http://bit.ly/2dFnEN7
Music: "Undeniable" by Vibe Tracks (YouTube audio library)
Script: The world is becoming more generous. That’s the good news coming out of the most recent world giving index, an annual study by the Charities Aid Foundation that provides insight into the scope and nature of giving around the world.
The research firm Gallup asked people from 140 countries around the world whether they had done these charitable activities in the past month: helping a stranger; donating money to a charity; and volunteering time to an organization.
Each country is given a percentage score and ranked. These are the top 10 most generous countries.
Number 10 is the United Arab Emirates. It jumped up from fourteenth to tenth thanks to its people’s willingness to help strangers. Its fifth place ranking in that category is the highest of any country in the overall top 10, and buoys its overall score after the UAE had the least amount of people on this list spend time volunteering.
Next is Ireland, it’s score is down three percentage points and is hurt by the second-worst helping strangers score on the top 10. This decline comes as Ireland’s economy is the fastest growing in Europe for the fourth straight year.
Eighth is the United Kingdom. It’s people rank as the seventh most generous at giving their money away, down four percent from its five-year average. However, its volunteering time is up three points. It will be interesting to see if behaviors in the UK change as the Brexit situation develops.
Taking the seventh spot is Indonesia. It scores in the top three in both donating money to charity and time spent volunteering. Overall, it leaped up fifteen spots in the rankings. This could have something to do with the survey coinciding with the holy month of Ramadan.
The Canadians come in sixth. Solid across the board, Canada doesn't crack the top ten in any single category--the only country on the list where that's the case. It's best ranking is in donating money, although slightly fewer Canadians did than last year.
Sri Lanka is fifth. Its ranking jumped up four places from its five-year average. It's helping a stranger and donating money scores are both now in the 60's, and its volunteering score is the fourth best in the world.
Fourth is New Zealand. It is top 10 in donating money and volunteering. Oceana, comprised solely of Australia and New Zealand, is a conflict free part of the world which allows its more economically well off people to be more generous with their time and money.
Which brings us to Australia, ranked third on this list. Its overall score is two points higher than its five-year average, helping it rise to the third spot. Like its regional neighbor New Zealand, its highest score is in donating money.
The United States is ranked second. Its average rank of nine across the three categories in the survey is best in the world, and its 61% overall score is the same as its five-year average.
And the number one ranked country on the world giving index - for the third year in a row - is Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Its overall score is largely driven by its 91% donating money score. Its heavily Buddhist population donates regularly to support the country’s monks.
Worldwide, people are more altruistic across all three of the categories in the study.
Separating countries by level of development provides even more insight into the data. We see people in developed places are slightly less likely to help a stranger.
Iraq and Libya are the countries most likely to help a stranger. The greater need amongst the population in these war torn places is encouraging more people to be responsive out of sheer necessity.
Men are more likely to help a stranger than women, and those over 50 years old are the least likely age group to do so.
On the flip side, the oldest among us are the most likely to donate money to charity.
The people of Turkmenistan are the most likely to donate their time, thanks to the widespread practice in that country of people spending their Saturdays volunteering.
Again, men are more likely to volunteer than women, and those over 50 are the least likely age group to volunteer their time.
And lastly, these are the continent-wide scores in each category compared to each other, and their five-year averages.
Thanks for watching.NEW YORK, USAs MEGACITY | Americas Largest CityTDC2017-08-19 | The story of New York City, America's megalopolis. Subscribe to TDC: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Music: Matt Stewart-Evans soundcloud.com/mattstewartevans Glimpse: soundcloud.com/glimpse_officialThe Future of Visual Effects (VFX)TDC2017-08-12 | From crossing the uncanny valley in human animation, to light-field camera technology that will change the way moving images are captured, this is the future of visual effects in films, TV, and VR.
Script: Visual effects have come a long way in the 124 years since we first set eyes on the motion picture. Today, the world’s most talented vfx studios create films and TV shows that seamlessly blend the digital image with the analog, allowing artists to make their wildest dreams come to life on the big screen. The full maturation of the tools used by creators working on the cutting edge of the industry - like computer-generated worlds, real-time previewing of motion capture, cloud-based rendering, and hyper realistic digital humans - has laid the groundwork for the media revolution we’re about to experience as 360 degree Virtual Reality goes mainstream.
This is a look at the near-term future of visual effects.
In order to understand where we’re headed, let’s look at where we’ve come from.
[Clip from Jurassic Park]
Many of today’s premier VFX artists were hooked by iconic scenes like this one from Jurassic Park: aha! moments that opened their minds to the power of mixing computer-generated imagery with live action footage.
Today, nearly 25 years after Spielberg's T-Rex changed the game, every single film on the 50 highest grossing movies of all time list relied heavily on visual effects, or was completely animated.
But what might be even more telling is that 25 of them were released in the last five years. That’s an indication of how reliant the big studios are on VFX and how much we, the public, love to see visual effects take us to worlds we otherwise couldn’t visit.
The king of VFX, is director James Cameron. For both Avatar and Titanic — the two highest grossing films of all time — Cameron pioneered a number of new techniques that heavily influenced the blockbuster movie industry, like a motion capture stage six times larger than any before, a way to preview shots in the virtual world in realtime while motion capturing them on set, and a technique to enable full performance capture using small cameras right in front of the actors' faces to collect facial expressions and, importantly, eye movement. This allowed Zoe Saldana to breath emotional life into her Neytiri character in a way that was compelling to the audience.
Full performance capture has become an industry standard. But while it's become commonplace to bring characters like the Na’vi, Maz Kanata, Caesar, or the Hulk to life using facial capture technology, using it — or any other CG technique — to make a believable fully digital human is another story.
We are getting closer to crossing the uncanny valley. While it’s still cheaper to hire Tom Hanks than to recreate him digitally, we’re a long way from the waxiness of the CG characters he brought to life in The Polar Express.
So far, the most lifelike use of digital humans was Rogue One’s resurrection of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin.
But Industrial Light and Magic had hours of reference footage of both actors, mapped the digital recreation of their faces onto full performances of other actors, and even found a lifecast of Peter Cushing’s face from a previous role.
[Artist] "This was gold for us because it was Peter Cushing as he appeared at a certain time in his life."
Neither Leia nor Tarkin’s cameos were very long or involved much movement, and they still didn’t quite look human.
But this technology could be about to take another leap. Last week, Weta Digital finally began post production on the four sequels to Avatar, which are slated for December 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025 releases.
And Cameron says he wants the films to set a new high bar.
[Quote from director James Cameron] “What Joe Letteri and Weta Digital bring to these stories is impossible to quantify. Since we made Avatar, Weta continued to prove themselves as doing the best CG animation, the most human, the most alive, the most photorealistic effects in the world. And of course, that now means I can push them to take it even further.”
But what really needs this push isn’t traditional films like Avatar, it’s the newest form of entertainment, virtual reality. Because effects studios can make literally anything else look photorealistic, creating believable digital humans seems to be the last big hurdle to creating feature-length films for VR. Why do I say that?Dhaka, Bangladesh: Worlds Fastest Growing MEGACITYTDC2017-08-06 | Dhaka, Bangladesh is the capital of the most densely populated major country in the world and is the planet's fastest growing city. NEW VIDEOS WEEKLY: Subscribe youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
All video/images used in accordance with Fair Use best practices in US Copyright Law.
Script: Everest and the Himalayas. It may not seem like this mountain range could shape a Megacity almost 600 kilometers away, but it does.
This place, the capital of the most densely populated major country in the world, is also the fastest growing city on the planet.
This is an examination of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The constant supply of melting snow and water that flows down the Himalayas to the south creates the largest delta in the world.
Much of it runs through Bangladesh, an agricultural paradise with some of the richest soil on the planet.
But all that water is also a curse. With more than 700 rivers flowing into the Bay of Bengal, many of the country’s residents become displaced when monsoon season arrives in mid June every year. Annual rainfall in Bangladesh is over 78 inches, and two-thirds of the country’s 64 districts experience regular flooding.
Combine that with the highest population density of any major country, and you understand why Dhaka is adding more than 400,000 residents a year. If even a little of Bangladesh’s precious land is overtaken by water, many of its people instantly become homeless. To top that off, when fields and villages flood, these already struggling micro-economies become even less sustainable. So people pour into the capital because that’s where the jobs are.
More than two million people now work in Dhaka’s many garment factories. That industry is the engine of the Bangladeshi economy, producing 80% of its exports. But it can be a hard industry to break into if you’re a farmer coming from the countryside, so many unskilled people find work in the off-the books economy. There’s a reason why this is known as the rickshaw capital of the world. Cash gigs like vegetable salesman, barber, shopkeeper, boatman, and cycling cabbie make up nearly 4 out of 5 jobs here. Average pay for this full-time work is less than $100 a month.
Development is a tough nut to crack. In order to raise revenue to provide better services and solve problems like traffic congestion, the city needs to bring these people out of the shadow economy. That idea was examined in the Global Post’s excellent report on Dhaka from a few years ago:
[Erik German, Global Post] “Legitimizing this vast slum economy would mean compelling millions of vegetable sellers, shop owners, barbers to get licenses, pay taxes, and formalize working conditions. It’s a gargantuan task.”
Dhakka wasn’t always so low in the global economic pecking order. In its heyday, as the commercial capital of the Mughal empire in the 17th century, it was one of the wealthiest and most prosperous cities on the planet. The Venice of the East, known then as Jahangir Nagar, was a worldwide hub of the cotton and silk trade. Its palatial caravansary, the Bara Katra, sheltered merchants traveling along the Grand Trunk Road, one of the oldest and longest thoroughfares in Asia.
Then, Dhaka fell into two centuries of turmoil that saw its status decline. First, the British took control in 1765. When they were forced out in the middle of the twentieth century, the city became the capital of Eastern Pakistan. Bangladesh finally won its independence in 1971, but only after suffering heavy damage during many battles. One of the legacies of two and a half centuries of power struggle in this region is its confusing and hard to define borders. The India-Bangladesh boundary is one of the strangest in the world.
One look and it's obvious, Dhaka is taking in people from the entire region—Bangladeshi or not.
This great migration is overwhelming the city’s infrastructure and services, which simply can’t keep up. Still, there are some obvious things the country should be doing to help Dhaka better manage its growth.
[Solana Pyne, Global Post] “One deceptively simple suggestion: put control over vital services in the hands of a single municipal government accountable to the people it serves. As in many unplanned cities of it’s size, Dhaka’s police, utilities, and roadways are controlled by a dozen or more national authorities, mostly run by political appointees.”